Chaos Overcomes Order ... for Light Storage
SAUDI ARABIA, YORK, England, and ST. ANDREWS, Scotland, May 8, 2013 — The word "chaos" almost always has a negative connotation, but physicists say it can be a good thing — at least where light storage is concerned. Researchers from the universities of York and St. Andrews, led by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, deformed mirros to disrupt the regular light path in an optical cavity (optical cavities typically store light by bouncing it many times between sets of suitable mirrors). The results showed, surprisingl...