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posted by chromas on Tuesday August 21 2018, @09:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the Over-at-the-Frankenstein-place dept.

The idea that light has momentum is not new, but the exact nature of how light interacts with matter has remained a mystery for close to 150 years. New research from UBC's Okanagan campus, recently published in Nature Communications, may have uncovered the key to one of the darkest secrets of light.

[...] To measure these extremely weak interactions between light photons, the team constructed a special mirror fitted with acoustic sensors and heat shielding to keep interference and background noise to a minimum. They then shot laser pulses at the mirror and used the sound sensors to detect elastic waves as they moved across the surface of the mirror, like watching ripples on a pond.

"We can't directly measure photon momentum, so our approach was to detect its effect on a mirror by 'listening' to the elastic waves that traveled through it," says [study co-author and UBC Okanagan engineering professor Kenneth] Chau. "We were able to trace the features of those waves back to the momentum residing in the light pulse itself, which opens the door to finally defining and modelling how light momentum exists inside materials."

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05706-3


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:36PM (#724428)

    Nothing you learn about physics as a non physicist is ever correct. Its always that you were just told a simplification once you find out enough to discover the flaw. Theres like 80 layers of this and in the end nobody knows the answer since its too hard to calculate it.

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