Advanced light: Sending entangled beams through fast-light materials

Michael Lewis's bestselling book "Flash Boys" describes how some brokers, engaging in high frequency trading, exploit fast telecommunications to gain fraction-of-a-second advantage in the buying and selling of stocks. But you don't need to have billions of dollars riding on this-second securities transactions to appreciate the importance of fast signal processing. From internet to video streaming, we want things fast.

Paul Lett and his colleagues at the Joint Quantum Institute specialize in producing modulated beams of light for encoding information. They haven't found a way to move data faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, but in a new experiment they have looked at how light traveling through so called "fast-light" materials does seem to advance faster than c, at least in one limited sense. They report their results (online as of 25 May 2014) in the journal Nature Photonics.

Seeing how light can be manipulated in this way requires a look at several key concepts, such as entanglement, mutual information, and anomalous dispersion. At the end we'll arrive at a forefront result.