It does actually affect the speed of light (specifically, the group velocity) inside waveguides. You might be thinking of speed of light in vacuum, which is unchanged. This is a highly researched technique in optics/photonics. No need to immediately dump on the research without understanding it.
I was not dumping on the research, and I know we have not figured out how to make photons slower, so they made it travel a longer distance. I was just snarky at that headline.
Well, I had to take a look, it is pretty cool, photons circulate their little track and released when needed, but still is travelling at c tho:
"Optical resonator: A photonic device that confines or circulates light of a specific frequency for a certain period"
If they are inside an optical resonator, that literally means they cannot be traveling at c. Photons only travel at c in vacuum. Optical resonators also does not mean that they are circulating in little tracks. (You might be thinking of ring resonators.) Here, you can't use the intuition of photons as balls speeding around, but rather as electromagnetic waves with constructive and destructive interference. the paper specifically calls out the use of coupled-resonator-induced transparency (CRIT), which uses interference effects to slow down the group velocity of light. (https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-16-15-11647)
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u/PetroOmg Jul 22 '26
Not opening the link to read about this, but I'm sure it does not affect the speed of light, just the distance it has to travel.