Physicists create new form of light

[C C]

Exactly...paywalls, but those damn scrooges of the science world have a bad habit of leaving things lying around. [...] Observation of three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium

Yep, little global excitement generated about this because it's nothing new. These so-called "photonic molecules" were proposed back in 2007, including the light-saber speculations. A report back in 2013 is about an experiment very similar to the current one.

The reason for having been suspicious about remarkable claims like this...

"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." (Scientists Create a New Form of Light by Linking Photons)

... is because after exiting the super-cold Rubidium cloud the pairs and triplets are not traveling vastly slower than normal. As indicated by accounts of the 2013 experiment:

"This Rydberg state propagates through the gas like a sluggish photon with a non-zero mass and when the collective state reaches the opposite edge of the gas cloud, the photon re-emerges at its original energy."

That light slows down when entering a special medium like a super-cold Bose-Einstein condensate is long taken for granted. Lene Hau lowered it to 17mph in 1999 and another group in a 2001 trial lowered it to 38mph. The photon pairs and triplets may figuratively "remember" their hybridized state back in a special medium, but that doesn't result in their retaining that slug's pace upon returning to unadulterated space. Plus, the entanglement of the system should soon collapse in the outer environment.

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Honestly, the first thing I thought of was Dark Matter being a type of Photonic Matter w/mass somehow formed in early universe when things were hot, with photons traveling thru space so slowly that they're barely visible. Surely if something can be done in a lab I have to wonder if nature is also capable. Need some big minds to look at this, must be more than being good for a new quantum computer.

Felt I had something to add from the early days of Dark Matter speculation. But in the course of trying to find that past literature I realize I've shifted yet again to a parallel universe where some _X_ was never entertained slash existed. Oh well... passive resignation, che sarà, sarà stuff.

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[Ostronomos]

What is the process by which this "false mass" is infused?