Scientists experiment with Cutting 'time Gaps' with lasers

A team of scientists have created "slits" in time, allowing them to send light through them in experiments first carried out more than 200 years ago. In the original experiment, the scientists sent light through slits in the screen, creating a unique pattern across the space.

But now, a new group of researchers has successfully taken the experiment one step further. Instead of creating "slits" in space, they used lasers to create "slits" in time. The pattern created was similar to the original experiment and changed the color of the ultrashort laser pulses.

The findings reportedly laid the foundation for advances in analog computers. By using "slits" in time, computers might be able to read and write data printed on beams of light, rather than relying on digital bits. This might even allow computers to learn from the data they work on, the researchers say.

This experiment has another significance, because it could also deepen our current understanding of the properties of light and how its fundamental interactions with materials work. The results of the study that created these slits are published in Nature Physics.

According to the paper, the researchers took advantage of indium tin oxide (ITO), a material that can be found in most smartphone screens. Scientists have learned that ITO can respond to light by changing from transparent to reflective. They found, however, that it happens much faster than originally thought.

In fact, the change occurred in less than 10 femtoseconds (billionths of a second). This is very, very fast. To determine why the change happened so quickly, the scientists looked into theories about how ITO's electronics responded in time to the light used to create the "slit."

The original experiment was first shown in 1801. In the new study, the researchers recreated the interference seen in the original experiment. They used a pump to pulse a laser and shine it on a screen coated with ITO. They found that when light from the laser hit the ITO's electrons, it went from transparent to reflective.

At the same time, they sent a follow-up detection laser to the ITO screen. When they did this, they saw a temporary change in the optical properties of the beam. This "time gap" is only a few hundred femtoseconds long, but it's still quite a breakthrough.

This isn't the first time humans have found a way to manipulate light across time, either. Of course, it's not quite the time travel you might see in the movies. In this case, however, the findings could open the door to new advances in analog computing, unlike anything we've seen before.