Scientists Create "Photonic Molecules" - Never-Before-Seen Form of Matter
Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it.
Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules -- a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25 paper in Nature.
The discovery, Lukin said, runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as massless particles which don't interact with each other -- shine two laser beams at each other, he said, and they simply pass through one another.
"Photonic molecules," however, behave less like traditional lasers and more like something you might find in science fiction -- the light saber.
Read more at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130925132323.htm
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The above story is based on materials provided by Harvard University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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Journal Reference:
- Ofer Firstenberg, Thibault Peyronel, Qi-Yu Liang, Alexey V. Gorshkov, Mikhail D. Lukin, Vladan Vuleti?. Attractive photons in a quantum nonlinear medium. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature12512
Harvard University (2013, September 25). Seeing light in a new light: Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 26, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130925132323.htm