Lightsabers at one point in time used to be a fantastical thing, and now a research around the light particles are showing a new type of interactive light, and this may pave the way for laser swords and quantum computers. When two light beams cross ways, the photons which make lights cross, make the concept of lightsabers impossible.
Now scientists at MIT and Harvard University show that photons, in fact, can be made to “interact” and this may pave the way for Star Wars space weapons.
Professor Vladan Vuletic had said, “The interaction of individual photons has been a very long dream for decades.”
The scientists had shone a weak laser through a cloud of ultra-cold rubidium atom, and the photons joined together. Scientists have also found that these photons had bound together at a fraction of electron’s mass and this means that they became sluggish and traveled at 100,000 times slower than the normal photon.
This light had remained bound after leaving the cloud. Sergio Cantu had said,
“What’s neat about this is, when photons go through the medium, anything that happens in the medium, they ‘remember’ when they get out.”
This means that the photons which have interacted with each other are assumed to be strongly entangled, and this is a key property for quantum computing. Professor Vuletic had added,
“Photons can travel very fast over long distances, and people have been using light to transmit information, such as in optical fibres.
“If photons can influence one another, then if you can entangle these photons, and we’ve done that, you can use them to distribute quantum information in an interesting and useful way.”
The research had been published in the journal Science, supported by the National Science Foundation. This team will look out for new ways to make interactions with photons like repulsion.
Professor Vuletic had concluded by saying,
“It’s completely novel in the sense that we don’t even know sometimes qualitatively what to expect.
“With repulsion of photons, can they be such that they form a regular pattern, like a crystal of light?
“Or will something else happen? It’s very uncharted territory.”