can light be frozen? given that temperature affects motion and...?

Question

272.5Celsius is the temp accepted as where molecular motion stops, light has no mass nor weight yet is affected by gravity and magnetic fields . I understand that thar is still some argument about what light is ie. wave/ particle or 'photon'(not how it emanates) it seems that an experiment sending a beam through a space at or near absolute kelvin would tell us much.Has it been tried?

Answer 1

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23925-light-completely-stopped-for-a-recordbreaking-minute.html they've been doing it since 1999. I don't know if they froze it for the minute-long one, but the others were done with cold.



"To break the minute barrier, George Heinze and colleagues at the University of Darmstadt, Germany, fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. This made it transparent to a narrow range of frequencies. Heinze's team then halted a second beam that entered the crystal by switching off the first laser and hence the transparency.



The storage time depends on the crystal's superposition. A magnetic field extends it but complicates the control laser configuration. Heinze's team used an algorithm to "breed" combinations of magnet and laser, leading them to one that trapped light for a minute."

Answer 2

"can light be frozen?"



Photons can be trapped in quantum wells. Not frozen, but "localized" in some sense.



Light has been trapped in a Bose Einstein condensate, to a speed of less than 1 m/sec. But again it is not light, but "electron dances", and is very lossy (60% as I recall).



You missed the sign on your temperature. And we can actually achieve *negative* (although only slightly) temperatures on the Kelvin scale.



The experiment does not tell us very much about light that we did not already know, no.

Answer 3

No. Light can't be frozen. This is fundamentally forbidden. Popular news outlets like to pretend light is frozen to make attractive headlines, but every experiment that claims to freeze light is really freezing atoms in the shape of the light that got absorbed, or is bouncing light back and forth in a very small space.

Answer 4

Light has no discernable mass. It is therefor strictly energy composed of photons that have no relationship with temperature other than they define energy. If a given mass is subjected to an absolute zero, it cannot emit heat. If something emits heat, it emits photons in the infrared range. Absolute zero can only be obtained in an absolutely pure vacuum. There is no such animal in our universe.

Answer 5

have a look at : http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.1923 it has a good set of references too, after a bit of a literature search you should soon be able to decide how much of your experiment has actualy been completed so far.