yah but they admitted its not light
No, that's not what they admitted. Let's take a step back: when you freeze water into ice, you still have water. The water is simply in a different
phase than it was before. Similarly, the light in these experiments was simply converted into a different phase.
An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. When atoms become packed super-closely together at super-low temperatures and super-high vacuum, they lose their identity as individual particles and act like a single super- atom with characteristics similar to a laser.
Yes, this "entirely new state of matter" was a Bose-Einstein condensate. The mechanics of the experiment are pretty interesting and very very cool, from the relatively simple and basic physics of
interface interactions and group velocity, to the cooler bits involving optical and magnetic constriction, collimation and cooling.