Light feels the heat and slows down

Earlier this year a group of physicists reduced the velocity of a laser pulse to 17 metres per second. However, the group had to use a Bose condensate - a gas of atoms cooled to a temperature of less than one microkelvin - to achieve this incredible reduction in velocity. Now another group of researchers has slowed light down to 90 metres per second in a gas of hot rubidium atoms. The new technique will be much easier to use for applications. The team, which was led by Edward Fry and Marlan Scully of Texas A&M University and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany, exploited a phenomenon known as electromagnetically induced transparency (Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 5229).