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Physicists Say They've Created a Device That Generates 'Negative Mass'
Physicists have created what they say is the first device that's capable of generating particles that behave as if they have negative mass. The device generates a strange particle that's half-light/half-matter, and as if that isn't cool enough, it could also be the foundation for a new kind of laser that could operate on far less energy than current technologies.
This builds on recent theoretical work on the behaviour of something called a polariton, which appears to behave as if it has negative mass – a mind-blowing property that sees objects move towards the force pushing it, instead of being pushed away.
Now physicists from the University of Rochester have created a device that allows them to actually create these polaritons at room temperature. They do this by manipulating captured photons and combine them with a kind of quasi-particle called an exciton to make something half-light/half-matter that some scientists affectionately refer to as 'magic dust'.
This alone is "interesting and exciting from a physics perspective," says quantum physicist Nick Vamivakas from Rochester's Institute of Optics. "But it also turns out the device we've created presents a way to generate laser light with an incrementally small amount of power."
Anomalous dispersion of microcavity trion-polaritons (open, DOI: 10.1038/nphys4303) (DX)
Previously: Physicists Create 'Negative Mass'
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KritonK on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:29AM (2 children)
Negative mass also means negative momentum. Thus, a beam of these negative mass particles, striking an object made of ordinary, positive mass, would make it move towards the source of the beam, essentially acting as a tractor beam.
And there I was thinking that Star Trek's tractor beams were even more improbable than warp drive!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:53PM (1 child)
The problem with this idea is,of course, that the space between space ships tends to be filled with vacuum, not with monolayer MoSe2. Not to mention that the ships tend to be too far away from each other to form an effective cavity, no matter how shiny they are.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @05:24PM
> The problem with this idea is,of course, that the space between space ships tends to be filled with vacuum, not with monolayer MoSe2.
Crazy talk. How can I hear all the explosions then?