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posted by janrinok on Saturday February 17 2018, @11:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-all-holding-hands dept.

Scientists Create a New Form of Light by Linking Photons

It's a glimpse of science fiction made fact: Scientists have created a new form of light that could someday be used to build light crystals. But before would-be Jedis start demanding their sabers, the advance is far more likely to lead to intriguing new ways of communicating and computing, researchers report this week in Science [DOI: 10.1126/science.aao7293] [DX].

Light is made up of photons—speedy, tiny packets of energy. Typically, photons do not interact with each other at all, which is why when using flashlights "you don't see the light beams bounce off each other, you see them go through each other," explains Sergio Cantu, a Ph.D. candidate in atomic physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In new experiments, however, the physicists coaxed individual photons to cozy up to each other and link, similar to the way individual atoms stick together in molecules.

[...] [Vaporizing] rubidium with a laser and keeping it ultracold creates a cloud the researchers contain in a small tube and magnetize. This keeps the rubidium atoms diffuse, slow moving and in a highly excited state. Then the team fires a weak laser at the cloud. The laser is so weak that just a handful of photons enter the cloud, a press release from MIT explains. The physicists measure the photons when they exit the other side of the cloud and that is when things get weird.

Normally the photons would be traveling at the speed of light—or almost 300,000 kilometers per second. But after passing through the cloud, the photons creep along 100,000 times slower than normal. Also, instead of exiting the cloud randomly, the photons come through in pairs or triplets. These pairs and triplets also give off a different energy signature, a phase shift, that tells the researchers the photons are interacting.

Also at Newsweek.


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  • (Score: 2) by leftover on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:32AM (5 children)

    by leftover (2448) on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:32AM (#639536)

    This is really a fascinating result. Almost sprung the $ for the full text but realized I would only understand about $1.50 of it. Hopefully some of the actual physicists on here will comment. My question is this: if the object emerging from the cold rubidium cloud has mass and is only moving at 0.00001 C how do they determine it is a clump of photons? The authors' credentials are awesome and I certainly tend to believe them. I just don't understand slow photons with mass.

    --
    Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by legont on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:43AM (1 child)

      by legont (4179) on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:43AM (#639540)

      My guess - but I'd like to see comments as well - that light is still traveling at light speed but takes curved path because the photons are "joined" together so the overall speed appears to be much lower. Yes, eventually we want stable standing crystals that could be "charged" to some serious energy levels.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:08AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:08AM (#639561)

        From TFS "Light is made up of photons—speedy" which are "tiny packets of energy". The suffix "-speedy" suggests that there exist alternate light particles, perhaps "photons-slowy" and maybe it is the relative proportions of the "-speedy" and "-slowy" particles that enable light to speed up or slow down.

        It might even be possible to isolate 100% "-slowy"s which could then form a crystal of pure "photons-couldn't be arsed".

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @01:43AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @01:43AM (#639558)

      Spectral absorption properties of the rubidium removing energy and slowing the photons to the extent where they begin to orbit one another? Wild guess that the mechanism could predict the result?

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:27AM (1 child)

      by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:27AM (#639565)

      I just don't understand slow photons with mass.

      And then it hit me, and I was enlightened.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:35AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:35AM (#639567)

        I just don't understand slow photons with mass.

        And then it hit me, and I was enlightened.

        1-1 pitch! [bonanzamarket.co.uk]

  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:26AM (1 child)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:26AM (#639564)

    But before would-be Jedis start demanding their sabers, the advance is far more likely to lead to intriguing new ways of communicating

    So ... funny cat holograms?

    • (Score: 2) by rylyeh on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:56AM

      by rylyeh (6726) <{kadath} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:56AM (#639574)

      Yes please! 😈

      --
      "a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @03:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @03:09AM (#639576)

    the new 100,000 times slower than normal computers...

    (yes I realize current boxes run on electronics instead of photonics but for the purposes of this quip I decided to ignore that)

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday February 18 2018, @03:26AM (3 children)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Sunday February 18 2018, @03:26AM (#639580) Homepage Journal

    They say there's porn on the Internet of anything you can imagine. And so much you'd never think of. Let me tell you, I never imagined there would be porn of photons having a 3-way. I'm no baby, but that's a new one for me.

    People that don’t know me, they like to say I look at porn -- people with fake sources. You know, fake reporters, fake sources. I don’t get to look at much porn. Primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents. A lot. I actually read much more -- I read you people much more than I look at porn.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @04:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @04:15AM (#639591)

      I read Playboy for the documents too.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:36PM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:36PM (#639682) Homepage Journal

      Rule #34, yo.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 19 2018, @06:26PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday February 19 2018, @06:26PM (#640181) Journal

      People that don’t know me, they like to say I look at porn...

      No Donald, it's porn-stars you like to look at.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 18 2018, @07:50AM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday February 18 2018, @07:50AM (#639651) Journal

    Here's the arXiv version of the actual article: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01478 [arxiv.org]

    Looking into this reveals what I already thought: Contrary to what the Smithsonian article suggests, the photons are not bound after they leave; they just preserve the statistics acquired while interacting in the rubidium cloud. The Newsweek article is formulated better in that respect.

    In particular, the following sentence from Smithsonian (also in the summary) is plain wrong:

    But after passing through the cloud, the photons creep along 100,000 times slower than normal.

    Rather, while passing through the cloud, the light is slowed down; afterwards they are back at normal speed.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by leftover on Sunday February 18 2018, @05:36PM

      by leftover (2448) on Sunday February 18 2018, @05:36PM (#639751)

      Thank you! That makes vastly more sense to me. Like a Bose-Einstein condensate.

      --
      Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @06:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @06:26AM (#639988)

      you would think smithsonian would hire writers with some clue in science.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:49PM (#639806)

    Forming photonic bound states

    Photons do not naturally interact with each other and must be coaxed into doing so. Liang et al. show that a gas of Rydberg atoms—a cloud of rubidium atoms excited by a sequence of laser pulses—can induce strong interactions between propagating photons. The authors could tune the strength of the interaction to make the photons form dimer and trimer bound states. This approach should prove useful for producing novel quantum states of light and quantum entanglement on demand.

    Protip: If you read some summary of a scientific result that even suggests that this might "one day" lead to light sabers, then know that the author misunderstood the science.

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