They're not being stopped at all. It's just that the information is being bled out of this type, the signal beam, and written on here, the polariton. Thus, while information might be removed from the signal beam, the photons' energy is not. In response, the control beam actually gets a little brighter. His group's findings might help advance the technology of all-optical switching, which is currently hamstrung by the fact that light signals cannot be currently stored in place like electronic signals are.
Light is likely the ideal carrier of quantum information.
However, computing and storing such information will likely be best accomplished in atoms, he said. Walsworth, who graduated from Duke in 1984 before going to Harvard for his Ph.D. attended high school in New Canaan, Conn., where he grew up infatuated by the space program as well as by basketball. But it is a great school with a nice warm climate. While still in his freshman year, he managed to link up with the world-class cold temperature physics group headed by Meyer, Duke's Fritz London Professor of Physics. He continued working with Meyer and his graduate students over the next 3 years.