Memories Made Of Light - Science News

Memories Made Of Light - Science News: "As the light pulse enters the crystal, it begins to slow down, its front reaching one end of the crystal and stopping as the rest of the light squeezes itself in to fill the whole crystal... The researchers switch on an electric field gradient, which changes the strongest absorption color in different parts of the crystal, so that one end of it absorbs strongly at the blue end of the spectrum and the other end toward the red. Quantum information from the light is stored in the oscillations of the crystal’s atoms; by reversing the electric field, the scientists get the atoms to re-emit light containing the same information as the original pulse."