Traping Light?

Question

Is it possible to trap light in a box of perfect mirrors?

and also a side question how would you know that you did it.

Answer 1

i think that lasers work on a similar principle

Answer 2

We live in a universe made of matter, and matter is messy.

Imagine a box made of matter. Is it ever going to have infinite reflectivity? Nope. It can be high but instead of being one its likely to be 99.99999% or something.

What is really interesting is that about 1.5 times the diameter of the schwartzchild radius, the space is so bent that light can orbit a black hole.
My point: you couldnt do it by reflecting, but you might do it with warped spacetime.

So lets say you got it perfect by using non-real matter, or gravity, or whatever, and you want to test if the light was still in there. You can make two photons be connected at the hip, entangled. Its called paired photons. They come from a single emission, and their polarizations are unknown, but perpindicular. When you polarize one, the other becomes polarized perpindicular to it. Thats the basis of a very interesting quantum mechanical version of .. not cryptography, but secure transmission.

Lets further say that your have electrons orbiting with the photons. Lets even further say you have two rings of photons counter-rotating and at different wavelengths.

Lets say you really have two such rings, except that one doesnt have electrons on the inside. Lets also say the photons in each are paired to the other. Lets further say that the photons are neither spatially nor temporally coherent.

If you put a polarization filter inline of the ring that doesnt have the electron, it will cause polarization of the photons in the other, which in turn will act like an inverse FEL on the co-orbiting electron, and either decelerate it so it falls into the gravitational anomaly, or accelerate it so that it comes out of the ring.

After you have polarized the light, or ejected the electron there arent any second tests you can do.

With this model you could test it once, but not twice.

Answer 3

In terms of verifying the experiment, you could place an independently powered light source (like a flashlight) inside a mirrored box, along with a camera. When the light source runs out (i.e., the flashlight's battery becomes totally depleted), the camera can see if light is still reflecting inside of the box.

However, I don't think the light would remained trapped in the box, because I believe the photons would very quickly dissipate all of their energy through collisions with the walls of the box.

Answer 4

I've often thought of that. Here's what I think. The perfect mirrors would, of course, need a light source. The light source could not be a mirror. Therefore, you'd have to have either a light inside, which would block the light, or you'd need an aperature that you'd need to shut faster than the speed of the light returning to the aperature.

Nutshell, I'd say it's impossible for a human to do with current technology.

Answer 5

Yup, it's possible - if you had *perfect* mirrors, you could definitely do that.

Of course, there's no such thing as a perfect mirror in reality, so the question is really a hypothetical one.

How would you know if you did it? Well, you might try making a very, very, very tiny hole in it - one big enough that very little light can escape. If you had a very fast and accurate detector and light source, you could determine just how much light goes in when you put some in there, and just how much comes out. From that, you could infer what would happen if you didn't have the hole.

Answer 6

Yes a LASER is a perfect example but the limiting factor is how to get rid of the heat.There is no such thing as a perfect Morrow.As the light bounced from side to side u would continue to loose energy. In a laser the length is tuned to the wavelength of the light,and as energy is added it will synchronize with the light that is in there. If u look at it with a magnifier glass u can see the little balls of energy.

Answer 7

Yes, but...

1. There is no such thing as a perfect mirror.

2. You couldn't know.

Answer 8

Trapping light? Laser is the closest thing.

Slow down light....now that another story.
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html

Answer 9

its probably possible but there would be no way to know if you did it for sure. Interesting question though. If i could give points for asking a good question, this would definately qualify.

Answer 10

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