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In optics, slow light is the propagation of an optical pulse or other modulation of an optical carrier at a very low group velocity.Slow light occurs when a propagating pulse is substantially slowed by the interaction with the medium in which the propagation takes place.
The light has effectively been slowed. When light returns to a vacuum and there are no electrons nearby, this slowing effect ends and its speed returns to c. When light enters a slower medium at an angle, one side of the wavefront is slowed before the other. This asymmetrical slowing of the light causes it to change the angle of its travel.
The absolute refractive index n of an optical medium is defined as the ratio of the speed of light in vacuum, c = 299 792 458 m/s, and the phase velocity v of light in the medium, =. Since c is constant, n is inversely proportional to v : n ∝ 1 v . {\displaystyle n\propto {\frac {1}{v}}.}
In a medium, light usually does not propagate at a speed equal to c; further, different types of light wave will travel at different speeds. The speed at which the individual crests and troughs of a plane wave (a wave filling the whole space, with only one frequency ) propagate is called the phase velocity v p .
Descartes assumed the speed of light was infinite, yet in his derivation of Snell's law he also assumed the denser the medium, the greater the speed of light. Fermat supported the opposing assumptions, i.e., the speed of light is finite, and his derivation depended upon the speed of light being slower in a denser medium.
Attenuation in fiber optics, also known as transmission loss, is the reduction in intensity of the light beam (or signal) with respect to distance travelled through a transmission medium. Attenuation coefficients in fiber optics usually use units of dB/km through the medium due to the relatively high quality of transparency of modern optical ...
The top electron has twice the momentum, while the bottom electron has half. Note that as the momentum increases, the phase velocity decreases down to c, whereas the group velocity increases up to c, until the wave packet and its phase maxima move together near the speed of light, whereas the wavelength continues to decrease without bound. Both ...
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is a coherent optical nonlinearity which renders a medium transparent within a narrow spectral range around an absorption line. Extreme dispersion is also created within this transparency "window" which leads to "slow light", described below. It is in essence a quantum interference effect that ...