Physicists create new form of light

[C C]

http://news.mit.edu/2018/physicists-crea...light-0215

EXCERPT: . . . individual photons that make up light do not interact. Instead, they simply pass each other by, like indifferent spirits in the night. But what if light particles could be made to interact, attracting and repelling each other like atoms in ordinary matter? One tantalizing, albeit sci-fi possibility: light sabers — beams of light that can pull and push on each other, making for dazzling, epic confrontations. Or, in a more likely scenario, two beams of light could meet and merge into one single, luminous stream. It may seem like such optical behavior would require bending the rules of physics, but in fact, scientists at MIT, Harvard University, and elsewhere have now demonstrated that photons can indeed be made to interact — an accomplishment that could open a path toward using photons in quantum computing, if not in light sabers....

MORE: http://news.mit.edu/2018/physicists-crea...light-0215

[Syne]

I thought we weren't suppose to cross the streams. Something about total protonic reversal.

[Magical Realist]

I was wondering when we were goin to get around to inventing that sort of moldable light we see in sci fi flicks. I just didn't know how they would do it.

[Zinjanthropos]

These newly weighed-down light particles were also relatively sluggish, traveling about 100,000 times slower than normal noninteracting photons.

Does that mean the light observed becomes dimmer? Slower approaching waves of light imitating a shift towards the red? I'm thinking dimmer and if they are really, really slowed down....possibly darker/less visible....with mass....ahhh you know where I'm going. Just messing around. 

[C C]

These newly weighed-down light particles were also relatively sluggish, traveling about 100,000 times slower than normal noninteracting photons.

Does that mean the light observed becomes dimmer? Slower approaching waves of light imitating a shift towards the red? I'm thinking dimmer and if they are really, really slowed down....possibly darker/less visible....with mass....ahhh you know where I'm going. Just messing around. 

High frequency involves photons with more energy. Since the laser input was incredibly weak to begin with, it might have even been below the visible range of light (infrared).

Setting aside the issue of how such an oddity as traveling "100,000 times slower" would correspondingly affect frequency, and the eccentricity of them being outputted as pairs and triplets...

Whatever the claims with regard to the photons behaving as "polaritons" within the cloud of rubidium atoms, and retaining "memory" of that later, I can't see them persisting sluggishly evermore at that speed once emerging from it. What muddles the affair up is the assertion that they "acquired a fraction of an electron’s mass". Usually an inferred "slowdown" revolves around what the "zig-zagging" or outright circularities of a photon eats up in terms of no progress in distance across a specially prepared medium. Which potentially pertains to this as well, but here they can blame it on the peculiarity of the mass acquisition. "As a single photon moves through the cloud of rubidium atoms, it briefly lands on a nearby atom before skipping to another atom, like a bee flitting between flowers, until it reaches the other end."

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[Zinjanthropos]

If the photons emerge out of the cloud as little clumps of photonic matter with mass then why wouldn't they be slower than when they entered the cloud?

[C C]

If the photons emerge out of the cloud as little clumps of photonic matter with mass then why wouldn't they be slower than when they entered the cloud?

It's an extraordinary claim: That photons have been produced which can enduringly travel through space (no special medium needed) at apparently only 3 kps or over 10,000 kilometers an hour. There are space-probes traveling several times faster than that. It should have every scientist and engineer in the world whose profession it could affect breaking the door down to poke and prod and run these particles through experimental hoops. The kind of marvel that makes one wonder what these pop-sci articles are leaving out in their bare details summaries, that would explain why the world hasn't so far shaken as if Klaatu and Gort just landed in Washington, DC.

- - -

[Syne]

If this results hold up, it's impact will rely on what you can do with such photons without upsetting this special relationship. It may be a useless oddity.

[Zinjanthropos]

If the photons emerge out of the cloud as little clumps of photonic matter with mass then why wouldn't they be slower than when they entered the cloud?

It's an extraordinary claim: That photons have been produced which can enduringly travel through space (no special medium needed) at apparently only 3 kps or over 10,000 kilometers an hour. There are space-probes traveling several times faster than that. It should have every scientist and engineer in the world whose profession it could affect breaking the door down to poke and prod and run these particles through experimental hoops. The kind of marvel that makes one wonder what these pop-sci articles are leaving out in their bare details summaries, that would explain why the world hasn't so far shaken as if Klaatu and Gort just landed in Washington, DC.

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.

[Secular Sanity]

The kind of marvel that makes one wonder what these pop-sci articles are leaving out in their bare details summaries, that would explain why the world hasn't so far shaken as if Klaatu and Gort just landed in Washington, DC.

- - -

Exactly...paywalls, but those damn scrooges of the science world have a bad habit of leaving things lying around.

***"Bound states of massive particles, such as nuclei, atoms or molecules, are ubiquitous in nature and constitute the bulk of the visible world around us. In contrast, photons typically only weakly influence each other due to their very weak interactions and vanishing mass. We report the observation of traveling three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium where the interactions between photons are mediated by atomic Rydberg states. In particular, photon correlation and conditional phase measurements reveal the distinct features associated with three-photon and two-photon bound states. Such photonic trimers and dimers can be viewed as quantum solitons with shape-preserving wavefunctions that depend on the constituent photon number. The observed bunching and strongly nonlinear optical phase are quantitatively described by an effective field theory (EFT) of Rydberg-induced photon-photon interactions, which demonstrates the presence of a substantial effective three-body force between the photons. These observations pave the way towards the realization, studies, and control of strongly interacting quantum many-body states of light.

***A coherent state of light is incident on the quantum nonlinear optical medium formed from Rydberg atoms. Due to the interactions inside the medium, the output light exhibits multi-photon entanglement and correlations. Developing a full theoretical description of the transmitted light field is challenging even in the limit of a few-photons because the photons must be treated as a continuous quantum field. Nevertheless significant simplifications in the theory are possible due to the large separation of scales between the microscopic degrees of freedom and the emergent scales present in the correlations of the output light. We recently developed an effective field theory (EFT) description of this transmission problem by taking advantage of this large separation of scales. This EFT framework forms the basis of our theoretical analysis of the three-photon transmission problem studied in this work."

Observation of three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium