New form of matter from chummy photons makes lightsabres a real possibility.
Story
Quote:
See, photons -- which are the elementary particles of light -- tend to be massless and kind of aloof. If you shoot two laser beams at each other, the photons just pass right through each other without so much as a hello or a high five.
But when the researchers fired a few photons into a vacuum chamber with a cloud of extremely cold rubidium atoms to take advantage of an effect called a Rydberg blockade, the photons started hanging out and even left the chamber together as the first "photonic molecule" -- a sort of quantum bromance -- ever observed.
And it's that bond between new particle bros that creates the new form of matter, which bears a resemblance to that most awesome weapon from a galaxy far, far away.
"It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers," said Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin in a news release. "When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."
|