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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Researchers have designed a nanoscale device that, under ideal conditions, can confine a "bit" of light (that is, light with a single precise energy value) for an infinite amount of time. Although a physically realized device would inevitably lose some of the trapped light due to material imperfections, the researchers expect that it should be possible to completely compensate for this loss by incorporating some form of optical gain like that used in lasers, so that in principle the lifetime can be infinitely large even in a real device.
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But now the scientists may have found a way to keep light in [phys.org].
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To overcome light's penchant for escaping, Lannebère and Silveirinha utilized an idea proposed by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner in 1929, and later extended by others, which has led to the discovery that transparent structures with tailored geometries can perfectly confine light by scattering it in a very specific way.

Lannebère and Silveirinha showed that this strategy for confining light can be achieved by shining light on a spherical "meta-atom," so-named because it allows light to have only a specific quantized energy value (creating a light "bit"), similar to how an atom allows electrons to occupy only certain quantized energy levels.

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