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Published online 14 November 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.246
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How to trap a rainbow
Imagined material could soon be a reality.
The Mother Superior in the Sound of Musicasked: "how do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?" The answer to this immortal question is probably still "you can’t"; but physicists may have solved the equally ponderable conundrum of how to hold a rainbow.
In research published in Nature,1 Ortwin Hess at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, and his colleagues have combined two fairly whacky physics research areas to come up with a material that, theoretically, should be able to slow light to a standstill.
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A plasma, a collection of positively and negatively charged particles, have many of the characteristics desirable for trapping radiation. It is a nonlinear medium,its refractive index can be manipulated precisely by the radiation passing through it and can be easily made negative, light of different frequencies can be trapped in different spatial locations due to the inhomogeneity of the refractive index. I wonder if this medium could be exploited to trap a rainbow and the ensuing applications.