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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the let-there-be-light dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Physicists at the University of Bonn have managed to create optical hollows and more complex patterns into which the light of a Bose-Einstein condensate flows. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new generation of computers. The researchers are now presenting their results in the journal Nature Photonics.

Light particles (photons) occur as tiny, indivisible portions. Many thousands of these light portions can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled.

The artist's rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green).

The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates.

Prof. Martin Weitz from the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn attracted attention among experts in 2010 when he produced a Bose-Einstein condensate from photons for the first time.

In his latest study, Prof. Weitz' team experimented with this kind of super-photon. In the experimental setup, a laser beam was rapidly bounced back and forth between two mirrors. In between was a pigment that cooled the laser light to such an extent that a super-photon was created from the individual light portions. "The special thing is that we have built a kind of optical well in various forms, into which the Bose-Einstein condensate was able to flow," reports Weitz.

Journal Reference: David Dung, Christian Kurtscheid, Tobias Damm, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger, Martin Weitz & Jan Klärs: Variable Potentials for Thermalized Light and Coupled Condensates, Nature Photonics, DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2017.139


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  • (Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:25PM (1 child)

    by jimtheowl (5929) on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:25PM (#554999)
    Your response was fair, so I will try to respond in kind.

    As previously stated, I understand "bullshit software and lousy programming", but it doesn't matter how many misguided souls end up in the field, there are fundamental, really difficult problems to solve, and the best tool we have so far is the computer. Generally speaking, it is fair to say that it is better to find a better algorithm to solve a problem than to speed up the machine, but we absolutely could purposefully and effectively use machines several order of magnitude faster than the ones we have in many fields. Despite that, most people are still going to use them for spell checking and abusing spreadsheets, but let them be.

    Physics classes, or at least some of the advanced ones can absolutely help you understand why artificial gravity is not a thing, at least in the foreseeable future. The reason that we got evidence from LIGO is that Einstein had gravity right (given our limited ability to comprehend it) in the first place and we knew what to look for to the degree of being willing to invest in it. We are not going to have "anti-gravity" because gravity is 'going in a straight line in curved space'.

    As an ant walks on an apple in a straight line from a local perspective but follows a curved path to the external observer, planets in the Solar system move in straight line in space curved by the gravity of the sun. It takes an enormous amount of energy to create mass, and mass is the only thing we know that curves space. I am not saying that we know everything for sure, but this is out of our reach for the foreseeable future. "Anti-gravity" is not going to be a convenient switch at any time soon.

    Apologies if I spout out dogma although I'm not sure where I did that. I don't claim to be all knowing and more than willing to be corrected.
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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:39AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:39AM (#555059)

    Generally speaking, it is fair to say that it is better to find a better algorithm to solve a problem than to speed up the machine, but we absolutely could purposefully and effectively use machines several order of magnitude faster than the ones we have in many fields.

    I'm not saying all progress should be forcibly halted here, just that I think that as a society, we've invested enough effort into it and could stand to move some effort into something else. I know that I personally would rather stop working on what I'm employed in, and work on SkyTran, but since society doesn't fund that project to any significant degree and it's basically vaporware at this point, that isn't going to happen. If we dumped the money into that that we dump into military projects, a lot of people would go to work on it, and we'd have a lot more progress on it. As a society, we're still dumping a lot of money into computing hardware research, and an absolute shitload into software (including a whole lot of bullshit software--see most phone apps). I'd rather see more investment in other things.

    Physics classes, or at least some of the advanced ones can absolutely help you understand why artificial gravity is not a thing, at least in the foreseeable future.

    I never said it was absolutely possible, or even that it could be achieved any time soon. IIRC, I listed it right next to tractor beams, something that's clearly right out of sci-fi. My more realistic examples were listed afterwards.

    As for your "curved space" stuff, yes, that's the Einsteinian explanation for gravity. IANAPhysicist, but I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics has an entirely different explanation involving "gravitons", and there's some other theories too like quantum gravity I think. Point is, the physicists aren't even agreed on how gravity works at all. So while it's extremely unlikely, you can't predict the future, and it's possible (however remotely) that someone will discover something which will enable artificial gravity (the real kind, not just spinning something to simulate it).

    Apologies if I spout out dogma although I'm not sure where I did that.

    You did the standard thing many people do when some sci-fi tech, usually artificial gravity, comes up in conversation and says "that's flatly impossible! Take a physics class!". That's dogmatic. They do it for FTL too. Most of us do realize that our current physics theories don't allow for artificial gravity, but we also realize our theories are not complete and our understanding is not perfect, so these things may be possible, even if unlikely. FTL travel is actually possible even, according to several physicists such as Miguel Alcubierre who wrote a paper on it. The latest version of the idea, by a NASA physicist, is still pretty unrealistic though, requiring exotic matter or something, but it's a big improvement over the first version which required all the energy in a galaxy. Who knows, maybe they'll figure out a way to make it work without exotic matter or negative energy, or perhaps they'll find a new physical effect to exploit. They still can't explain the EMDrive.