Let There Be Lumens: Researchers Link Photons To Create New Form Of Light
Image Credit: Sputnik/Yury Strelets
Visible light is made of photons, special particles known to never interact with each other. But can they can be forced to interact or bind together? Looks like they can, according to the results of an extraordinary MIT experiment.
Previously, photons were perceived as exceptionally individualistic particles. They never appeared to interact with each other, explaining why beams of light intersect and do not reflect with each other. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked: if photons are similar to atoms, can they be bound together into something like a molecule?
To answer this question, a team consisting of Ph.D. candidate in atomic physics at MIT Sergio Cantu; Aditya Venkatramani, a Ph.D. candidate in atomic physics at Harvard University, alongside several other collaborators, came up with a peculiar set-up: a cloud of chilled rubidium atoms, Smithsonian magazine reported.
Yes, rubidium — that alkali soft metal notorious for spontaneously igniting, particularly violently when coming in contact with water (explaining why it is kept either in airtight ampules or in kerosene).
The scientists evaporated rubidium with a laser, but kept the resulting cloud in an ultracold state. According to Smithsonian, this keeps the atoms diffused, moving slowly but in a highly-excited state, a decidedly abnormal condition from that found in nature.
After creating the strange substance, researchers again lit it with a laser, but so weakly that only a handful of photons entered the cloud. And here's where the real magic begins.
"Normally the photons would be traveling at the speed of light-or almost 300,000 kilometers per second. But after passing through the cloud, the photons creep along 100,000 times slower than normal," Smithsonian reported.
As mind-blowing as it may appear, the condition is plausible: the "slow light" phenomenon was noted in 2004 by researchers at UC Berkeley who slowed a beam of light to just 9.7 kilometers per second — almost 22,000 mph — still way below lightspeed, which, as everyone knows, is fixed at 670,615,200 miles per hour.
