Maybe Noel Langley was ahead of his time when he changed L. Frank Baum’s silver shoes into ruby slippers for the big screen. As reported in Nature, physicist Robert Boyd and colleagues at the University of Rochester used a ruby at room temperature to cut the speed of light to a sluggish 57 metres per second. Such ‘slow light’ has been around for several years, but previously it could be made only at very low temperatures and in exotic gasses. Slow light might be used in telecommunications and computer networks in which information is sent and processed as signals that can hop between electronic circuits and fibre-optic transmission lines. Engineers could delay or stop light pulses to synchronize or store them.
Such developments would be extensions of existing technologies, however. A more exciting prospect is that room-temperature “slow light” technologies could usher in a revolution in optical computing which could replace current electronics. Perhaps it would lead to quantum computing as well. The business community is paying attention to this work; so should you.