Steve asks:
> I guess I'm dense, but I don't see anything in this indicating that light
> was "stopped" or "stored", any more than a tape recorder "stops and stores"
> sound. In both cases
> 1) The incoming energy is recorded onto a storage medium
> 2) In the process of 1), the incoming energy is absorbed/destroyed

Adding to what Ken said, the point is that in "absorbing" then incoming
light pulse, *all* of the information contained in that pulse is transfered
to the absorbing medium, and when the pulse is "played back" or "released"
the "new" pulse contains *all* of the state of the original pulse and is
thus impossible to distinguish from the original.

This is important because in a Quantum Computer you generate "entangled"
states in particles which you then want to be able to communicate without
losing the superposition of states in the particles which stores your
information and makes Quantum Computers interesting.

Thus the demonstrated method of stopping a light pulse for an arbitrary
amount of time means that you can suspend a quantum bit without losing any
of the (theoretically infinite!) amount of information encoded in it.

G.