Thanks BenLurkin.
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Posted on 02/18/2018 1:01:40 PM PST by BenLurkin
In new experiments, however, the physicists coaxed individual photons to cozy up to each other and link, similar to the way individual atoms stick together in molecules.
The photon dance happens in a lab at MIT where the physicists run table-top experiments with lasers. Cantu, his colleague Aditya Venkatramani, a Ph.D. candidate in atomic physics at Harvard University, and their collaborators start by creating a cloud of chilled rubidium atoms. Rubidium is an alkali metal so it typically looks like a silver-white solid. But vaporizing rubidium with a laser and keeping it ultracold creates a cloud the researchers contain in a small tube and magnetize. This keeps the rubidium atoms diffuse, slow moving and in a highly excited state.
Then the team fires a weak laser at the cloud. The laser is so weak that just a handful of photons enter the cloud, a press release from MIT explains. The physicists measure the photons when they exit the other side of the cloud and that is when things get weird.
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. Also, instead of exiting the cloud randomly, the photons come through in pairs or triplets. These pairs and triplets also give off a different energy signature, a phase shift, that tells the researchers the photons are interacting.
.... The team had seen two photons interact before, but they didn’t know if triplets were possible....
Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that the three-photon grouping is even more stable than two. “The more you add, the more strongly they are bound,” says Venkatramani.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
Now, if they can just make a torpedo out of it.......
Oh no...does this mean we have to change all of our light bulbs AGAIN?
“Physicists coaxed individual photons to cozy up to each other and link”
Dirty, filthy physicist pimps.
Just more of the outbreak of physics porn on Free Republic.
“In a highly excited state”
See!
See what happens when young minds are exposed to this filthy physics porn!
The origins of Hard Light.
“The more you add, the more strongly they are bound”
Oh, these physicists.
We think they are sitting there in their white lab coats thinking great thoughts when, in reality, they are looking at group sex and bondage.
What a sad day for science.
Sounds like me after a few shots of bourbon.
What really does it is when they start playing the cheesy skin flick music.
"An abstract image because it’s hard to see three individual photons."
“Now, if they can just make a torpedo out of it.......”
Kind of spooky to think this could be a turning point in that direction.
I understand little of it, but I’m damned impressed.
In 50 years rubidium cloud lamps with chains of photons bouncing around inside will replace lava lamps.
*the above is not classified as long as the particle family and methods are not disclosed.
**the above classification disclaimer is not classified
Oh, what an entangled web we weave.
The team envisions controlling the attractive and repulsive interactions of photons so precisely that they could arrange photons in predictable structures that hold together like crystals. Some photons would repel each other, pushing apart until they find their own space, while others hold the larger formation and keep the repelling ones from scattering. Their patterned arrangement would be a light crystal.
...
I think I recall Arthur Clarke writing about storing human consciousness in frozen lattices of light.
OK I found it:
In his immortal masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Clarke worded his vision of advanced post-biological civilizations in the universe as:
And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space.
To appropriately apply the famous Fermi quote: “Well, where are they?”
Sounds a lot like LASER, or in other words: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation...just a wild guess..
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