Public release date: 19-Aug-2005

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/200...d-ltt081905.php

Contact: Luc Thevenaz
luc.thevenaz@epfl.ch
41-21-693-4774
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Light that travels… faster than light!
This press release is also available in French.

A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical computing to the fiber-optic telecommunications industry.

On the screen, a small pulse shifts back and forth – just a little bit. But this seemingly unremarkable phenomenon could have profound technological consequences. It represents the success of Luc Thévenaz and his fellow researchers in the Nanophotonics and Metrology laboratory at EPFL in controlling the speed of light in a simple optical fiber. They were able not only to slow light down by a factor of three from its well – established speed c of 300 million meters per second in a vacuum, but they've also accomplished the considerable feat of speeding it up – making light go faster than the speed of light.

This is not the first time that scientists have tweaked the speed of a light signal. Even light passing through a window or water is slowed down a fraction as it travels through the medium. In fact, in the right conditions, scientists have been able to slow light down to the speed of a bicycle, or even stop it altogether. In 2003, a group from the University of Rochester made an important advance by slowing down a light signal in a room-temperature solid. But all these methods depend on special media such as cold gases or crystalline solids, and they only work at certain well-defined wavelengths. With the publication of their new method, the EPFL team, made up of Luc Thévenaz, Miguel Gonzaléz Herraez and Kwang-Yong Song, has raised the bar higher still. Their all-optical technique to slow light works in off-the-shelf optical fibers, without requiring costly experimental set-ups or special media. They can easily tune the speed of the light signal, thus achieving a wide range of delays.

"This has the enormous advantage of being a simple, inexpensive procedure that works at any wavelength, notably at wavelengths used in telecommunications," explains Thévenaz.

The telecommunications industry transmits vast quantities of data via fiber optics. Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second. But information cannot be processed at this speed, because with current technology light signals cannot be stored, routed or processed without first being transformed into electrical signals, which work much more slowly. If the light signal could be controlled by light, it would be possible to route and process optical data without the costly electrical conversion, opening up the possibility of processing information at the speed of light.

This is exactly what the EPFL team has demonstrated. Using their Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) method, the group was able to slow a light signal down by a factor of 3.6, creating a sort of temporary "optical memory." They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn't move over – relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected.

Slowing down light is considered to be a critical step in our ability to process information optically. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) considers it so important that it has been funnelling millions of dollars into projects such as "Applications of Slow Light in Optical Fibers" and research on all-optical routers. To succeed commercially, a device that slows down light must be able to work across a range of wavelengths, be capable of working at high bit-rates and be reasonably compact and inexpensive.

The EPFL team has brought applications of slow light an important step closer to this reality. And Thévenaz points out that this technology could take us far beyond just improving on current telecom applications. He suggests that their method could be used to generate high-performance microwave signals that could be used in next-generation wireless communication networks, or used to improve transmissions between satellites. We may just be seeing the tip of the optical iceberg.

As regards FTL, I wonder if what they are witnessing is quantum entanglement.
Information has been theorized and demonstrated since the 1970s to be transferable from one atom to another across space (I lost a journal article which had information on early experiments). And electrons have been found to teleport from one energy shell to another.

Anyway, experiments have been conducted on cesium gas, using lasers (like the atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, although I do not know of research they have done, if any).

But, one last thing regarding this topic. A related U.S. government interest is in
quantum encryption. Moving data to photons would enable tremendous security.
Only those involved in transmission of such data would, in theory, have access. Of course, we are talking about quantum computing. Anyone who makes a serious advance in that field will probably receive a lot of attention.

Very interesting, I wonder if this could be a loophole for timetravel, all you'd have to do is slow the light around you, move faster than it, and get propelled backwards in time.

I believe that time travel is purely possible. I just don't think the human race will ever discover how to do it.

This could be a start...but it's too dangerous to look into.

why can't the human race learn time-travel? thats just ridiculous, I mean, if its possible, its possible and thats the end of it, we can learn it... anyway, it may just be an illussion that it is travelling faster then regularly

time travel is such a massively hard process, if you go by the methods proposed by scientests, and personally i dont think it is possible

time traveling requires lots of work. even then time traveling is only a theory. time traveling and the speed of light do go hand-in-hand. humans WILL NEVER reach anything near speed of light. what i mean by that is we won't have planes or ships that can do that. moving from 90% speed of light to 91% would require an infinite amount of energy. we can make atoms go speed of light

i have heard about the slowing down and speeding up of light before...

Slowing down light is nothing new.Its been known for at least 50 years light travels slower through refractive mediums such as water,glass, and optical fibers.The supposed speeding up light is nothing new either, but the fact is, c wasn't exceeded.The apparent speed up is a consequence of the wave properties of light.The actual front velocity of the light stayed below c.

Quoted from above, "The telecommunications industry transmits vast quantities of data via fiber optics. Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second."

It is fairly common knowledge light travels no where close to 186,000 miles per second in optical cables.Statements like this make me question the so called scientists refered to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

I didn't say it's not allowed...I just think it's too dangerous. And we'll probably die before we figure it out.