An international team of physicists, including researchers from the Universities of York and St. Andrews, has demonstrated that chaos can beat order -- at least as far as light storage is concerned.
In a collaboration led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, the researchers deformed mirrors in order to disrupt the regular light path in an optical cavity and, surprisingly, the resulting chaotic light paths allowed more light to be stored than with ordered paths.
The work has important applications for many branches of physics and technology, such as quantum optics and processing optical signals over the internet, where light needs to be stored for short periods to facilitate logical operations and to enhance light-matter interactions.
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