Um, sooo, light is NOT a field after all?
It’s a floor wax!
It’s a dessert topping!
It’s both!!
That would make a nice lamp.
Hand me a light.
No, a Coors light!
Photon torpedoes?
Pics or it didn’t happen.
And, But, Also, A New Car!
Well, this will help in the development of our first Star Trek-like transporter….lol.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t all matter a solid and a liquid at all temperatures but absolute zero. Even in a solid, the atoms are still moving, still vibrating, just very slowly compared to the “liquid” form.
Breaking: Big brawl between baffled scientists who can’t decide whether it is a solid or a liquid... several injured egos resulting.
Bkmk
Sounds like how the holodecks work.
The article goes on to assert: "In other words, this is a supersolid made not from atoms, but from light itself."
The popularizing of science by media does a lot of "in other words."
ZME Science is ZME Science LLC in the UK, with a subsidiary in Romania. Their "About" mentions that they see themselves as a "ZME Science brand," to be further republished. But this article is itself re-publishing, relying on and showing URL links to Cosmos, New Scientist and Nature, with a further and interesting link to Advanced Photonics Lab in Lecce, Italy. All of them publishers of articles, except the latter.
Advanced Photonics Laboratory CNR Nanotec @Lecce Advanced Photonics Lab
That site links to the further abstract of a paper, as seen at Cornell University,
From the abstract, "we focus on the theoretical emergence of a second emission threshold...."
Supersolidity of polariton condensates in photonic crystal waveguides Submitted on 9 Jul 2024 (v1), last revised 13 Jan 2025
This is fascinating stuff, but still theoretical in that no application in the real world is being demonstrated. And it is not "made from light," but rather about looking for phenomenon "bearing strong similarities with the highly sought supersolid phase in Helium and ultracold atomic gases but with a novel mechanism typical of the driven-dissipative scenario. We then propose clear-cut and unequivocal experimental signatures that would allow to identify supersolidity phenomena in polariton condensates."
Spending the morning, reading more into this will be fun, at the "source" level of papers and such. The Italian site, in English, has a bundle of abstracts of papers. Deeper in, one must have paid access to some and log in to arXiv.org for others.
Thanks for posting. The "made from light" found in this secondary journalism is inaccurate, and amusingly sensational.
How can anyone understand a system that operates differently depending on if it is being observed or not observed? This stuff gives me a headache.
Democrats: “there must be some way to tax this!”
"You know, you know, the thing...."
"If you don't support Borgs, you ain't black"
"Corn pop was a bad Borg....C'mon man"
Polaritons are hybrid particles that are part light and matter. I am just an engineer and not a physicist but still find these physics topics fascinating. Thanks for posting.
We are just scratching the surface in trying to understand the universe God has created.
Decent overview of polaritons here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqJOQnJ4lEY
Silly putty?
Lightsabers coming soon.