A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions.

If Internet fiber optic signals could be controlled by light, it would be possible to route and process optical data without the costly electrical conversion, opening up the possibility of processing information at the speed of light.