optical ‘wells’ for a super-photon tagged posts

The artist’s rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green). Credit: David Dung, Universität Bonn

Physicists create optical ‘wells’ for a super-photon for the first time. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new-gen computers. Many thousands of photons can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled. The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates. Prof...