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The scientist who has been ableto stop light
Lene Vestergaard Hau is a physicist, born i
n Denmark in 1959.
Neither of her parents had been
trained in science, but they
were clear that Lene would receive the
same opportunities as her brother, a stance
which was fundamental for her education.
She studied physics and mathematics, and
received a PhD at Aarhus university.
She was a two year post doctoral fellow
at Harvard, and later received a
MacArthur Fellowship.
Her academic speciality was
theoretical physics, but gradually her interests
changed to experimental research,
in an effort to create a new type of
matter known as a Bose-Einstein
condensate.
She is well-known for her experiments in
which she reduced
the speed of a ray of light
to 17 meters per second
thanks to a superfluid in an ultracold atomic gas close
to absolute 0. Subsequently she reduced
the speed of light to one mile an hour,
and in the year 2001 it was possible to completely
freeze light for one-thousandth
of a second.
Despite the fact that this amount of time may
seem negligible, according to Lene “it is an
incredibly long period; although we think we
can stop light for a longer time. It's great to
look inside a room and see a crowd of ultracold atoms floating. In this strange state,
light takes on a more human dimension,
because you can almost touch"
She has received numerous awards, including
the NKT of the Danish Physical Society or the
Samuel Friedman Rescue Award, and is part of
the Royal Danish Society of Sciences.
Since 1999 she is Professor of Physics and
Applied Physics at Harvard University.