Physicists say they have brought light particles to a screeching halt, then revved them up again so that they could continue their journey at a blistering 186,000 miles per second.
The results are the latest in a growing number of experiments that manipulate light, the fastest and most ephemeral form of energy in the universe.
Eventually, researchers hope to harness its speedy properties in the development of more powerful computers and other technologies that store information in light particles rather than electrons.
The experiments were conducted in separate laboratories in Cambridge, Mass., by groups led by Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard and the Rowland Institute of Science and Ronald L. Walsworth and Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics.
The results will be published in upcoming issues of the journals Nature and American Physical Letters.
Physicists who did not participate in the experiments said the two research papers make an important contribution to understanding the properties of light. However, any practical applications are far off, they said.
"It's a real first," said Stanford physicist Stephen Harris, who collaborated on a 1999 experiment with Hau that slowed light to 38 mph. "These experiments are beautiful science."
In the latest experiments, researchers took steps to not only slow light to a virtual crawl, but to stop it completely. Whether either group actually stopped the light completely is open to interpretation. The probe laser actually is a bundle of light waves that form a single wave. This is known to physicists as the group velocity; it is the light that your eye sees and a camera uses to record an image.
Manipulating light's properties is a subject of intensely competitive research. In July, physicists in Princeton, N.J., apparently forced a laser pulse to travel faster than the conventional speed of light.<
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