{"id":161633,"date":"2023-04-06T12:23:47","date_gmt":"2023-04-06T17:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/light-waves-squeezed-through-slits-in-time"},"modified":"2023-04-06T12:23:47","modified_gmt":"2023-04-06T17:23:47","slug":"light-waves-squeezed-through-slits-in-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/light-waves-squeezed-through-slits-in-time","title":{"rendered":"Light waves squeezed through \u2018slits in time\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/light-waves-squeezed-through-slits-in-time2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A celebrated experiment in 1,801 showed that light passing through two thin slits interferes with itself, forming a characteristic striped pattern on the wall behind. Now, physicists have shown that a similar effect can arise with two slits in time rather than space: a single mirror that rapidly turns on and off causes interference in a laser pulse, making it change colour.<\/p>\n<p>The result is reported on 3 April in <i><i><i>Nature<\/i> Phys <\/i>ics<\/i><sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-023-00968-4#ref-CR1\">1<\/a><\/sup>. It adds a new twist to the classic double-slit experiment performed by physicist Thomas Young, which demonstrated the wavelike aspect of light, but also \u2014 in its many later reincarnations \u2014 that quantum objects ranging from photons to molecules have a dual nature of both particle and wave.<\/p>\n<p>The rapid switching of the mirror \u2014 possibly taking just 1 femtosecond (one-quadrillionth of a second) \u2014 shows that certain materials can change their optical properties much faster than previously thought possible, says Andrea Al\u00f9, a physicist at the City University of New York. This could open new paths for building devices that handle information using light rather than electronic impulses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A celebrated experiment in 1,801 showed that light passing through two thin slits interferes with itself, forming a characteristic striped pattern on the wall behind. Now, physicists have shown that a similar effect can arise with two slits in time rather than space: a single mirror that rapidly turns on and off causes interference in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}