Researchers Working On Crystallizing Light 129
An anonymous reader writes Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter. The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place. "It's something that we have never seen before," said Andrew Houck, one of the researchers. "This is a new behavior for light."
kind of reminds me,... (Score:3)
of the power cubes from the old transformer series *gig*
APRIL FOOLS! (Score:3)
Seriously? A crystal?
Right. Can they get it to gaseous form first? :-) Or do they sublimate straight from pure energy, right to solid state?
Also, point of clarification (pun intended): Does this crystalline light need to be first observed as a particle, or will a wave observation prove to be equally effective in achieving desired result?
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Light is gaseous, ideal gas in fact: photons don't interact with each other but will simply bounce off the walls of a container.
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photons don't interact with each other
In a vacuum, at low intensities. Within media photons can interact through all sorts of nonlinear processes at varying levels of intensity depending on the medium. Even within a vacuum photons can nonlinearly interact, although that requires intensities far beyond what has been achieved in a lab so far, and barely occurs to our knowledge in nature (one example is interaction between a magnetar's magnetic field scattering high energy gamma rays).
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Gaseous? So it is an element. ARRGH!
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In an ideal gas, the molecules collide elastically with each other. I'm no expert, but that's what I remember from university 20 years ago and Wikipedia seems to confirm it. Photons don't collide with each other afaik.
kind of reminds me,... (Score:1)
Been able to buy this for Years (Score:5, Funny)
Just go to the local grocery & get some "Crystal Light" tastes pretty good too.
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Holograms and lightsabers by 2025. (Flying cars by 2026).
Linux on the desktop this year!
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Finally!! (Score:5, Funny)
I can now run faster than light! :)
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Considering light was slowed down to zero a few years back, you are now just catching up to it? :)
Re:Finally!! (Score:4, Funny)
Considering light was slowed down to zero a few years back, you are now just catching up to it? :)
Well given it had a 10 millisecond headstart, he'll be catching up for a fair wee while....
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Things come to mind (Score:1)
How many photons can you store in a cubic cm? Could you then release those photons on demand? How much energy could you store in this sort of a system? Can you use it as a battery? Could it be weaponized? Imma charging mah lazers?
Re:Things come to mind (Score:4, Funny)
How many photons can you store in a cubic cm? Could you then release those photons on demand? How much energy could you store in this sort of a system? Can you use it as a battery? Could it be weaponized?
The British already did this in 1854 [wikipedia.org] - duh. There were even poems [wikipedia.org] about it.
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Pending lawsuit... (Score:2, Funny)
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Pepsi might sue. I don't think Crystal Light is going to do much of anything!
Frozen in an excited state. -- That's impossible! (Score:2)
(obligatory Real Genius line.)
Sounds familiar (Score:2)
Sounds like someone figured out the basis for the holodeck on the Enterprise.
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How do photons restrained by force fields make it to someone's eye?
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Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
Easy: "I'm not in the meth business. I'm in the empire business."
I may be confusing Heisenberg's though.
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Hard Light Bridges (Score:2, Funny)
And coming soon: Excursion funnels!
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I read that as Excursion Funerals. Twice. It really sounds like a good idea though. I have to update my will now.
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I read that as Excursion Funerals. Twice. It really sounds like a good idea though. I have to update my will now.
"Excretion Funerals" here.
Same disease, smells worse...
Discworld (Score:4, Interesting)
The Switch (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like technobabble (Score:3)
It sounds like one of those articles scientists put in journals to discredit their peer review process. They make up a bunch of crap that sounds all sciency and then laugh when it gets published.
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From the article:
To build their machine, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms engineered to act as a single “artificial atom.” They placed the artificial atom close to a superconducting wire containing photons. By the rules of quantum mechanics, the photons on the wire inherit some of the properties of the artificial atom – in a sense linking them.
They use a lot of "artificially" in the article. And I like the big jump of "By the rules of quantum mechanics".
LIGHT SABRE (Score:1)
That's right, here comes my Light Sabre
The power of bad reporting (Score:5, Informative)
Instead, they have caused some photons to be entangled so that they gain some of the properties of "liquid or solids". Not all the properties, not even the properties of a crystal, instead some of the properties of 'liquid or solid"
This article is just about one of the worst dumming down of science I have read. It was built up to sound 'click worthy', mainly be ignoring the actual research. They don't even use the word "entangled".
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Well of course they didn't, I don't think their research had anything to do with Disney.
photons are not particles (Score:2)
we barely can define a photon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
it exhibits "wave/particle duality"...it's not like a super-ball that's bouncing around a room...it's not matter...so how could these researchers possibly say that something that has no resting mass can be 'frozen in place'...
it's a wave...you can't "freeze" a wave...you freeze **the ocean**
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Your analogy is also incorrect. A photon is an electromagnetic wave, it's not a vibration propagating through a medium. An ocean wave without the ocean is nothing, it's energ
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Actually, what I found intriguing about the article is that photons' "physical" properties appear to be relational, which goes a long way to explaining how they can behave as waves AND particles. It kind of seems like photons are really the relationship between the physical universe and the Higgs field, and are very much quantum. As such, photons are trainable based on what they interact with, and how they are measured. This has interesting ramifications for future modeling and even future means of photo
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this is what i was getting at when I said "you don't freeze a wave, you freeze the ocean"
I didn't explain it as precisely but this is how I would have stated it if i was smarterer
i guess this is just another example of me hating pop-science headlines...this stuff is cool enough just for what it is!
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which goes a long way to explaining how they can behave as waves AND particles.
Quantum mechanics has explained how photons act like waves and particles for nearly hundred years now. Wave functions explain photons just fine in such situations covering both when it acts like particles and when it acts like waves. In some cases you can make simplifications to the equations and get stuff that looks like classical particle behavior, and otherwise you get wave behavior, but it is still one underlying theory and model. It is no different than how Einstein's relativities can give you Newto
Re:photons are not particles (Score:4, Insightful)
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Your comment sounded kinda insightful, apart from your use of a made up word 'scenarii'.
I mean - do you mean, as opposed to your own made-up word, 'kinda'? Or your made-up phrase, 'made up', come to that?
(Ob pedantry: Actually, of course, as language seems to be hard-wired into people, but the actual words clearly aren't, every word we ever write or say is ultimately 'made-up' - it's just that groups of people who speak the 'same' language tend to be more-or-less in agreement on what words to use. 'Scenarii' is an abnormal plural that's almost certainly down to a misunderstanding of the singul
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Actually, GP, had the right etymology - in Italian it would be scenari - but he did blatantly make up a plural that is not used in English. Hypercorrectness is a fault, not a virtue. It confuses your audience and leads them to doubt your accuracy. Kinda [oxforddictionaries.com] silly, really.
Bad reporting, but.... (Score:2)
Actually, it is an interesting result. AFAICT, they have taken one of the ideas that came out of quantum optics (the JCM [wikipedia.org]) and created an experimental system that apparently allowed for coupled JCM system to form a simple lattice (probably where they misappropriated the "crystal" metaphor from).
As for what this is good for? Seems like right now it's too simple, so basically nothing, But researchers anticipate this idea will find use as a quantum simulator for studying dissipation and/or decoherence from qua
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Indeed it was so bad that I stopped reading halfway. The person who wrote this clearly didn't get anything of what the scientists are trying to do in this project.
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Lighten up, Francis. This is Slashdot. Nobody expects good journalism or even semi-accurate plagiarism here.
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Close, but I think it was "hard light."
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Marvel did it first! DAZZLER! (Score:1)
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But hopefully without the disco this time.
This article makes no sense whatsoever (Score:5, Insightful)
This article makes no sense. It talks about "crystallizing" light but never says what it means. Then it goes into quantum computers. In the middle, it links to a journals.aps.org article that doesn't even contain the word "crystal" in it. All the quotes are vague things like "It’s something that we have never seen before" which doesn't help either.
I thought the Slashdot comments might help, but they are all just jokes. So I take it no one else understands what this article is about either.
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it's a science news blog. were you expecting more than the abstract and a commentary?
go here:
http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.031043
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It's bad reporting.
This has been in the news a while back, and was dubbed "photonic crystals" then too (but that term was already in use for something completely different).
Basically, you start with a quantum mechanical system (usually a bunch of atoms) that has very few degrees of freedom (some kind of potential trap). This is the "crystal" part.
Then you add a number of photons to that system. The photons couple with the electrons in the lattice. Because of the restricted degrees of freedom, only very few
Re:This article makes no sense whatsoever (Score:5, Interesting)
So I take it no one else understands what this article is about either.
In fairness to the writer of the simply hideous article, which is an amazing compendium of misleading nonsense, irrelevancy and outright falsehood, the research team seem to be speaking in a private language. Even their "popular summary" is difficult for a physicist who has done some work in quantum fundamentals to understand.
It appears they have created a fairly standard state in which microwave photons are strongly interacting with each other via a superconductor. Their is for some reason they do not explain and seem to take for granted, a phase transition in the system's behaviour as the number of photons drops.
This may (or may not) be related to the "phase/photon-number uncertainty principle", which is analogous to the usual position/momentum uncertainty principle: you can know the precise classical phase of a many-photon beam or you can know the number of photons in it, but not both at the same time. As the total number of photons goes down the uncertainty in the the number of photons goes down, increasing the uncertainty in the phase (that's one fairly hand-waving way to think about it, at least.)
After the phase transition the system is in some weird quantum state that they liken to Schrodinger's cat, but since Schrodinger's cat is in a perfectly ordinary quantum superposition that knowledge adds exactly nothing to our understanding of what the state actually is. Presumably they are referring to some particular state that is currently well-known within quantum information theory, but by presenting the idea to a lay audience without elaboration they simply add to the overall sense of confusion and, uh, incoherence.
Re:This article makes no sense whatsoever (Score:5, Informative)
In fairness to the writer of the simply hideous article, which is an amazing compendium of misleading nonsense, irrelevancy and outright falsehood, the research team seem to be speaking in a private language.
No kidding ... I was thinking as I was reading it, "wow, this is the worst-written paper I've read in a long time". They seem to go to lengths to make it as baroque, dense, and devoid of semantically (if not syntactically) valid prose as possible.
I don't just mean that it's very technical - they seem to be engaged in active denial of communication. I spent a little time teasing apart the sections I was most interested in, but that's the opposite of the job of a paper.
I know the stereotype is that "nerds can't write" but really many of the best papers in physics are also fun to read.
Nice cut and paste (Score:2)
Nice job linking to an "Blog" that was quite literally cut and pasted from a legit article:
phys.org/news/2014-09-solid-previously-unsolvable-problems.html
Expect the one posted here to get a DMCA request in short order.
Looking at their other "Blogs" it appears this entire site is nothing but cut and pasted stories from various science sites.
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Well, it does say "Science Blog - Straight from the Source". So what were you expecting?
And, like everyone else, I can't make heads or tails out of it either, but at least your source has a cool picture.
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod .. (Score:2, Interesting)
Crystal light? .. Reminds me of of the poem by Eugene Field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe — Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew. "Where are you going, and what do you wish?" The old moon asked the three. "We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we!" Said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song, As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
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I don't know why, but to me it comes out oddly comforting when Slashdot reformats it as prose.
This just in... (Score:1, Funny)
This just in... faster than light speed is now possible by dropping a clump of light crystals on the floor and then running away.
You know the rules of physics (Score:2, Funny)
Solaranite (Score:1)
John W. Campbell got there first (Score:2)
already use them (Score:1)
Pictures? (Score:2)
Silmaril? (Score:2)
Pah! Feanor did this way back in the Years of the Trees.
No elves, not as bright as a Silmaril. Lame.
First commercial application... (Score:2)
Oil of Olay now comes with added liquid light complex to give your skin a warm glow.
Something we've never seen before (Score:2)
Science fiction comes true (Score:2)
Back in the mid-40's, John W Campbell wrote a series of science fiction stories featuring "lux metal" which was basically matter composed of photons instead of electrons, protons, and neutrons. It had, shall we say, "interesting" properties. Wasn't easy to manufacture, either.
I like that (Score:1)
I like that! Imagine constructing images out of photons.... - oh wait.....
This is not new (Score:1)
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Mod parent +9000 funny.
Wait, crystallized light? (Score:2)
What's next, chocobos?
more dumb jokes (Score:2)
Just wait until they create Photon-Nine. The entire universe will freeze! aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!