Lene Hau
Lene Hau
Lene Vestergaard Hauis a Danish physicist. In 1999, she led a Harvard University team who, by use of a Bose-Einstein condensate, succeeded in slowing a beam of light to about 17 metres per second, and, in 2001, was able to stop a beam completely. Later work based on these experiments led to the transfer of light to matter, then from matter back into light, a process with important implications for quantum encryption and quantum computing. More recent work has involved...
NationalityDanish
ProfessionPhysicist
Date of Birth13 November 1959
CountryDenmark
Physics is about questioning, studying, probing nature. You probe, and, if you're lucky, you get strange clues.
Why is it that I notice so many brilliant scientists using Macs for their personal computers; why does the Lawrence Livermore & Berkeley Labs buy millions of dollars worth of Macs?
Of course, in all magic tricks there's a secret.
Incidentally, think about the ramifications of storing data on light waves that can be stopped and started at the speed of light.
To get high data transfer rates in communicating information, you would love to use optical fibers. The problem is that light is extremely hard to manipulate. So we make a perfect copy of the information carried by the light. We transfer it to matter - the condensate.
There's a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before - that is mind-boggling. It's worth everything.
To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.