On February 15th 2018, scientists at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard, announced in the Journal Science, that they have created a new form of light. According to Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolf Professor of physics at MIT and Mikhail Lukin of Harvard, who led the research team, groups of three photons were observed interacting with each other. They say that the photons were sticking together in a way that formed a new photonic matter.
Normal beams of light are composed of photons or tiny packets of energy, but those photons don't interact, they just pass each other. A way to picture this is to imagine shining two flashlights so as to make the beams touch each other. What you will see is the two beams passing each other by. However, when the research team shined a weak laser beam through a cloud of rubidium atoms, the photons interacted by binding together in pairs and triplets.
Photons, by nature, travel at 186,000 miles per second, but the researchers observed them traveling through the cloud at 100,000 times slower than normal. As the photons interacted, the resulting pairs and triplets gave off a phase shifted energy signature. The team worried as to whether these photon groupings would be stable. However, they discovered that a three photon grouping was more stable than two.
The team also found that the bond grows stronger as more photons are added. While the idea or possible use for this discovery may lead some to envision Star Wars like light sabers, the team wants to use the attractive and repulsive interactions of the photons to one day make light crystals. They believe that such crystals could be used to in quantum communication and quantum computing.
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