Scientists trap light inside a magnet

ccny.cuny.edu

69 points·geox··14 comments

"Light trapped inside a magnetic crystal can strongly enhance its magneto-optical interactions."

It's an interesting article, but bad title. The novelty isn't in trapping light, but in how this material's optical properties change in response to a magnetic field.

Source article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06275-2

I wonder if this will lead to co-applications with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_trap (s)

EM waves are bent by magnetic fields? i thought linearity/superposition meant they’d sum with the field and pass right through

Classically and in vacuum I think your intuition is right. However in this case, I think this is happening in bulk materials not in vacuum, and there are other interactions on the atomic scale so light propagating through the lattice has weird affects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_optics

IIUC, they are using a semiconductor and the photons are transformed by the crystal into electron-hole pairs. It's a very non linear material.

I’ve always wondered, if/when AI eventually passes us in all that there is, all will be left is the soul, likely the one an only thing we can posses that they cannot.

Trapping light, energy at different vibration levels gives pause. Jokingly of course, but makes you wonder…

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