Its discovered a completely new form of matter that works in the same way as the lightsabers used in a scene from the film 'The Empire Strikes Back'. As the photons enter the cloud of cold atoms, Lukin said, its energy excites atoms along its path, 'causing the photon to slow dramatically'. This new form of matter discovered has only ever been seen in science-fiction. Molecule cutter can be perfectly sharp and harmless to mammals, as for its use in agriculture there are no kinetic parts it can be perfect for safety at low intensity.This cutting laser behaves like lightsaber by moving photons around in a solid mass.
In Harvard university and MIT claim the matter they created had, up until now, been purely theoretical and runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as mass less particles which don't interact with each other. Shine two laser beams at each other and they simply pass through one another.‘Photonic molecules,’ however, behave less like traditional lasers and more like a light saber.‘It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to light sabers,’ Lukin said. ‘When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other.‘The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.’In fact, what the scientists were witnessing is known as the Rydberg blockade.
This states that atoms neighbouring an atom that's been excited say, by a passing photon cannot be excited to the same degree as the initial atom. Slowing these atoms can either be done from a sling shot motion off the planet or retrieved off the martian moon Phobos as it is nearer to mars either way its not so so complex, but has to be exact.
'It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to light sabers,' said researcher Mikhail Lukin. 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. While the effect is unusual, it does have some practical applications as well. ‘It feeds into the bigger picture of what we're doing because photons remain the best possible means to carry quantum information,’ as said to space ship designer ‘The handicap, though, has been that photons don't interact with each other.’To build a quantum computer, he explained, researchers need to build a system that can preserve quantum information, and process it using quantum logic operations.
The challenge, however, is that quantum logic requires interactions between individual quanta so that quantum systems can be switched to perform information processing. ‘What we demonstrate with this process allows us to do that,’ Lukin said. ‘Before we make a useful, practical quantum switch or photonic logic gate we have to improve the performance, so it's still at the proof-of-concept level, but this is an important step.’ The system could even be useful in classical computing, Lukin said, considering the power-dissipation challenges chip-makers now face. A number of companies have worked to develop systems that rely on optical routers that convert light signals into electrical signals, but those systems face their own hurdles. Lukin also suggested that the system might one day even be used to create complex three-dimensional structures such as crystals wholly out of light. ‘What it will be useful for we don't know yet, but it's a new state of matter, so we are hopeful that new applications may emerge as we continue to investigate these photon molecules' properties,’
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