Harvard and MIT physicists found a way to make photons interact with each other, almost five years ago

[daniel l.]

Something about making molecules out of photons or whatnot.

https://phys.org/news/2013-09-scientists-never-before-seen.amp

[cubinator]

Interesting stuff! It's always nice to find new properties of things we already knew some about. I don't anticipate that we'll be seeing Hard Light Bridges anytime soon, though.

[HebaruSan]

Thread title grossly misrepresents the article. There's nothing hard about these photons:

Quote

An effect called a Rydberg blockade, Lukin said, which states that when an atom is excited, nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree. In practice, the effect means that as two photons enter the atomic cloud, the first excites an atom, but must move forward before the second photon can excite nearby atoms.

The result, he said, is that the two photons push and pull each other through the cloud as their energy is handed off from one atom to the next.

Also this story is 4.5 years old.

[daniel l.]

Just now, HebaruSan said:

Thread title grossly misrepresents the article. There's nothing hard about these photons:

Also this story is 4.5 years old.

Sorry, I only just learned about this. And 'hard light' is what someone on reddit called it.

What would you suggest I change it to?

[HebaruSan]

1 minute ago, daniel l. said:

Sorry, I only just learned about this. And 'hard light' is what someone on reddit called it.

What would you suggest I change it to?

Maybe "Harvard and MIT physicists found a way to make photons interact with each other, almost five years ago"?

[daniel l.]

1 minute ago, HebaruSan said:

Maybe "Harvard and MIT physicists found a way to make photons interact with each other, almost five years ago"?

Done.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, daniel l. said:

Sorry, I only just learned about this. And 'hard light' is what someone on reddit called it.

What would you suggest I change it to?

I saw the same article but I chose not to present it. It seemed trivial.

Photons have long been known, at very high energies, to interact, thats baryogenesis, though the conditions varied the basic principle was the same. In quantum mechanics time is of little value at the quantum scale, and geometry of space is not orthogonal but represents the evolving local geometry of quantum space[time]. While seemingly trivial, particle-antiparticles can annihilate each other forming energetic particles, but since time does not exist such processes are also reversible (unless observed). Thus high densities of energetic photons can interact with virtual pairs generating particle and anti-particles.

Photons are Boson (spin = -1, 0 1, i believe), their spins can align and when given a chance photons prefer to travel in packets. If the material they are traveling through is also bosonous in nature (meaning the sum of all the spins are multiples of 1 then it would make sense the photons could allign. This typically can occur at very low temperatures. 

 

Edited February 17, 2018 by PB666

[Vanamonde]

I think what these guys mean to say is, "Thank you for sharing your interest in science with other KSP players, @daniel l."