Researchers show that two photons, depicted in this artist’s conception as waves (left and right), can be locked together at a short distance. Under certain conditions, the photons can form a state resembling a two-atom molecule, represented as the blue dumbbell shape at center. Credit: E. Edwards/JQI
It’s not lightsaber time, not yet. But a theoretical physicist team has taken another step toward building objects out of photons, and the findings hint that weightless particles of light can be joined into a sort of ‘molecule’ with its own peculiar force. The findings build on previous research that several team members contributed to before joining NIST. In 2013, collaborators from Harvard, Caltech and MIT found a way to bind 2 photons together so that one would sit right atop the other, superimposed as they travel.
Now, NIST and Maryland team etc have theoretically shown that by tweaking a few parameters of the binding process, photons could travel side by side, a specific distance from each other. While the new findings appear to be a step in the right direction–if we can build a molecule of light, why not a sword? Problem is that binding photons requires extreme conditions difficult to produce with a roomful of lab equipment, let alone fit into a sword’s handle. Even so, “lots of modern technologies are based on light, from communication technology to high-definition imaging,” Gorshkov says. “Many of them would be greatly improved if we could engineer interactions between photons.”
eg engineers need a way to precisely calibrate light sensors and the findings could make it far easier to create a “standard candle” that shines a precise number of photons at a detector. Binding and entangling photons could allow computers to use photons as information processors, a job that electronic switches in your computer do today. Not only would this provide a new basis for creating computer technology, but it also could result in substantial energy savings. Phone messages and other data that currently travel as light beams through fiber optic cables has to be converted into electrons for processing – an inefficient step that wastes a great deal of electricity. If both the transport and the processing of the data could be done with photons directly, it could reduce these energy losses.
“It’s a cool new way to study photons,” he says. “They’re massless and fly at the speed of light. Slowing them down and binding them may show us other things we didn’t know about them before.” http://www.nist.gov/pml/div684/20150908lightsaber.cfm
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