Can You Trap Light In A Mirror Box

The loss is about 1 100 000 so after 100 000 reflections the total intensity decreases e 2 718 times or so.

Can you trap light in a mirror box.

At least until you die. No mirror is a perfect reflector. The current information transfer in form of internet services is fastest if optical fibers are used. Ill assume 1 5 m average.

Yes light can be trapped between mirrors planar in case of lasers fabry perot etalon and ring resonators. First of all you cannot generate energy from nothing. On the other hand it is possible to trap light by slowing it down. If a photon strikes a mirror or some thing.

A ray of light in a box of mirrors would last a tiny fraction of a second before it was gone. If the distance between the mirrors is 3 meters the light travels 3 meters times 100 000 300 000 meters before it gets diluted e times and it takes 1 1 000 of a second. If you can stop the light you ve trapped it. May reflect up to 99 999 percent of the incident energy.

Presumably the photons are still around when you close the lid but it goes dark. The photons are still there. Speed of light is 299 792 458 m s so thats 199861638 reflections per second. The easy way is to get two perfect mirrors and face them precisely at.

So some is lost for each reflection and after a few hundred reflections none is left. You can t trap light in a mirrored box as there are no perfect mirrors complicated dielectric mirrors can get to 99 999 reflectivity but only for a very small region of the spectrum. If the insides of the box were perfectly reflecting like mirrors the photons would just bounce around for a long time. Our mirrors i believe are very efficient so assuming they have a 99 9 refecting efficiency and you have a 1 1 1 m box of mirrors that means the light would travel between 1 and 1 732 m between impacts.

You can store light for a fraction of a millisecond or so scientists have devised several ways to trap light and save it.