Stopping Light

In 2013, at the University of Darmstadt, in a crystal, physicists used electromagnetically induced transparency(EIT), a phenomenon in which a opaque yttrium silicate crystal is cooled to a very cool temperature. Then, the team fired a laser at the mineral causing its atoms to shift into a quantum superstate. During that shift, the crystal became transparent to certain frequencies of photons. Finally, the scientists fired a second of that frequency. Then, they shut off the first laser trapping a couple million photons in the crystal- for some 60 seconds. This was not the first time physicist have used EIT to slow or stop light. In 1999, they slowed photons to 17 m/s and in 2001, they stopped in completely for a few milliseconds. In early 2013 a team at GIT successfully pulled this off for 16 seconds. In our lifetimes, computers will probably be capable of storing billions of terabytes in a microscopic chip, or storing terawatts in a battery the size of a grain of sand.