Researchers say they have slowed light to a dead stop, stored it and then released it as if it were an ordinary material particle.

The achievement is a landmark feat that, by reining in nature's swiftest and most ethereal form of energy for the first time, could help realize what are now theoretical concepts for vastly increasing the speed of computers and the security of communications.

Two independent teams of physicists have achieved the result, one led by Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., and the other by Dr. Ronald L. Walsworth and Dr. Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also in Cambridge.

Light normally moves through space at 186,000 miles a second. Ordinary transparent media like water, glass and crystal slow light slightly, an effect that causes the bending of light rays that allows lenses to focus images and prisms to produce spectra.