Physics breakthrough: A completely new light source created
By cooling photons, the light particles condensed so they could behave like a single entity.
Nobody has ever created a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with photons before. BECs are usually made with cold atoms of gas.
As it turns out, atomic gases aren’t the only ones that act like a point-like particle at high temperatures and like a wave in cold temperatures. Photonic gases can act that way too.
\"photonic gases\".... hmmmm... Sounds like one of Superman's by-product powers.
Physics breakthrough: A completely new light source created
By cooling photons, the light particles condensed so they could behave like a single entity.
Nobody has ever created a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with photons before. BECs are usually made with cold atoms of gas.
As it turns out, atomic gases aren’t the only ones that act like a point-like particle at high temperatures and like a wave in cold temperatures. Photonic gases can act that way too.
I can't think of an application off-hand, but I get the feeling that researchers such as these folks are 20+ years of getting within striking range of a possible, sane application of something like that.
does anyone - even OP - know what this is about?
It doesn't seem like a light source to me, it seems like a way to align photons - not EMIT them.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827884.000-sea-of-photons-made-to-act-as-one-superphoton.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news wrote:First, the team placed two concave mirrors 1 micrometre apart, and filled the lens-shaped cavity between them with a red liquid dye. They then fired a green laser at the cavity. The dye absorbed photons from the laser and re-emitted them at lower-energy yellow wavelengths, which the mirrors focused at the centre of the cavity. While some photons were indeed absorbed by the mirrors, the large number present in the laser more than made up for this.
When the low-energy photons at the centre of the cavity reached a density of about a trillion photons per cubic centimetre, they began to act as a single photon, shifting in appearance from a blurry glow to a bright point (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09567). "All the photons marched in
lockstep," Weitz says.
Also did anyone else read this and think "THIS EXPERIMENT IS USELESS WITHOUT PICS"
?
Neo wrote:o kool ^_^
as predictable as a broken record. Why not just make this vapid expression your sig?
Mjolnir wrote:Sounds pretty cool to me, is there an actual use or just cool physics stuff? :) I'm a little too lazy to read the article... stuffed with Turkey atm!
I'm a little too lazy to read the article... stuffed with Turkey atm!
