This all seems as exotic or esoteric to us now as these invisible electromagnetic waves were to Heinrich Hertz, who reportedly regarded them as mere scientific curiosities with no practical applications.
Unable to foresee radio, television, telephones, remote controls, microwave ovens, Wifi, Bluetooth… you get the point, that “thing with no practical applications” is now a staple of daily life, and all around us. We have fully tamed Electromagnetism.
Now with things like Quantum Computing and Bose-Einstein Condensates, we are starting to tame a new esoteric scientific curiosity - the probability wave function, the Uncertainty Principle.
Heinrich Hertz did not foresee things like satellite television and Spotify while looking for a spark flying across two metal tips from his dark room in the 1880s, but surely we have a better grasp of what potential benefits the newest technologies have in store for humanity?
Or are we for the most part still in the Hertz-like naive fiddling process?
Either way, there is going to be some incredible magic inside that quantum box!
Argh! Edited the title, thank you for the correction.
Anyway, I believe they freeze lithium atoms very near Absolute Zero, so the electrons slow down, but because of the Uncertainty Principle, the lithium atoms’ orbitals expand and overlap, creating a sort of gel where they can trap photons (I imagine from a laser) and slow them down to zero.
Awesome stuff! Idk how they could use this in regular life but, maybe as an improvement to photographs?
If it hits everyday life, it will be buried deep under a straightforward application layer. Some hobbyists bought “electricity”; most people bought “toasters” and “electric lights”. CCDs revolutionized photography but the vast majority of users had no idea they were using one.
Depending on the mechanism by why which the condensate slows down the photon (for example, if it doesn’t mess with polarization), you might be able to use it to store one half of an entangled pair of photons while you use the other to do whatever.
Putting together these two lines of thinking, a BEC could potentially be used as part of an authentication process to set up a secure channel; generate a pair, send one half of it off to your counterparts, verify their response using the stored one you have.
I think today, the stored photon is kept in a fiber optic loop; the idea would be the same as what you can do in a lab, but maybe much much smaller and cheaper.