Friday, September 27, 2013

At Last - My Own (REAL) Light Saber

Creating molecules out of light:

A group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to bind photons into molecules -- a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25 paper in Nature.

"Photonic molecules," behave like something you might find in science fiction -- the light saber.

"Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other," Lukin said. "What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules.

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