Holy crap - lightsabers
From
geek.com:
New form of photon-based matter is essentially a lightsaber
Modern physics has taught us quite a lot about light and how it behaves, but some of what we thought we knew might not be entirely accurate. A team of scientists from MIT and Harvard have been herding photons through a cloud of super-cold atoms in an attempt to get them to do something that was once considered impossible � bind together. According to a new paper, they may have succeeded in creating a new form of matter entirely from photons, which is basically a lightsaber.
Conventional wisdom holds that photons are massless particles that don�t interact with each other, so how can they form molecules? The key was to create a special medium in which photons can interact strongly enough that they attract one another as if they have mass. This so-called �photonic matter� has been theorized for some time in scientific circles, but only in the abstract.
The team used a vacuum chamber filled with rubidium atoms to facilitate the formation of photonic matter. The cloud of gas was cooled to within a few degrees of absolute zero using (fittingly) lasers. Short laser pulses were then used to send individual photons into the cloud where the chilled gas sapped energy away from them, causing the photons to slow down considerably by the time they exited the cloud. If more than one photon was sent in at the same time, the researchers found the particles would lose so much energy that they emerged together as a single molecule.
Still a loooong way from the Star Wars sidearm but very very cool! Remember what lasers were like fifty years ago? Laboratory curiosities -- now look at them.
Posted by DaveH at September 26, 2013 5:38 PM