It’s easy to shine light through a crystal, but researchers at Princeton University are turning light into crystals–essentially creating “solid light.” “It’s something that we have never seen before,” Dr. Andrew Houck, associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the researchers, said in a written statement issued by the university. “This is a new behavior for light.” New behavior is right. For generations, physics students have been taught that photons–the subatomic particles that make up light–don’t interact with each other. But the researchers were able to make photons interact very strongly. To make that happen, the researchers assembled a structure of 100 billion atoms of superconducting material to create a sort of “artificial atom.” Then they placed the structure near a superconducting wire containing photons, which–as a result of the strange rules of quantum entanglement–caused the photons to take on some of the characteristics of the artificial atom.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 13:29:13 +0000