Editor's Summary
8 February 2007
A trick of the light
The cover graphic represents a remarkable experiment. A light pulse stopped and extinguished in one box is revived from a completely different box in a separate location and sent back on its way. In the actual experiment, a slow light pulse was stopped and stored in one Bose–Einstein condensate (the first 'box'), then revived from a different condensate, 160 
m away. Information was transferred by converting the optical pulse into a travelling matter wave more amenable to manipulation than light. The experiment (video streams of which can be seen online) shows that the interaction of resonant laser fields with Bose-condensed atom clouds is a powerful way of manipulating light with matter, and vice versa. Such quantum control may find application in quantum information processing and the controlled sculpting of atomic wavefunctions.
News and Views: Quantum physics: Indistinguishable from afar
Imprinting a coherent light pulse on the spins of atoms is standard quantum sorcery. Retrieving the same light pulse from a second, distant set of atoms looks rather like black magic. But it, too, is just quantum mechanics.
Michael Fleischhauer
doi:10.1038/445605a
Letter: Coherent control of optical information with matter wave dynamics
Naomi S. Ginsberg, Sean R. Garner & Lene Vestergaard Hau
doi:10.1038/nature05493
