Researchers slow light to a crawl in liquid crystal matrix

Light traveling in a vacuum is the Universe’s ultimate speed demon, racing along at approximately 300,000 kilometers/second. Now scientists have found an effective new way to put a speed bump in light’s path. Reported today in The Optical Society’s open-access journal Optics Express, researchers from France and China embedded dye molecules in a liquid crystal matrix to throttle the group velocity of light back to less than one billionth of its top speed.

Fuente : http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/tos…