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German Scientists Create Bose-Einstein Condensate Using Photons
xt writes "A team of physicists, led by the University of Bonn's Martin Weitz, have managed to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (here's a more detailed explanation) out of photons, previously thought to be impossible. The research was published in the journal Nature (abstract, and the arXiv has the submitted paper as a PDF) and has possible applications on solar energy technology and shortwave lasers, which would be well-suited to the manufacture of computer chips as the process uses lasers to etch logic circuits onto semiconductor materials. Seems like Moore's law is safe again!"
You know it isn't nice to insult crap like that.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Super Photons, original flavor: Not From Condensate.
Regular Photons: From Condensate.
Spooky Photons: (Note: contains only about 50% of stated volume)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"Seems like Moore's law is safe again!"
That's great, but if memory and I/O speeds don't keep up, the extra FLOPS are becoming more and more worthless....
Currently hooked on AMP
The research is a fascinating work about fundamental physics. This is one case where a sales pitch about about possible, only tangentially related applications in computing is quite unnecessary.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Better yet, if it really works at room temperature, this method will still be workable once we've squandered the world's supply of helium. (Thanks for a "free market" solution, Congress.)
How much other basic science is going to shortly become impossible - basically prohibitively expensive when we hit the end of "Cheap Helium"?
Makes you wonder what fraction of helium is in the parade floats, and if they attempt to scavenge any of it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As the photon BEC works at room temperature and seems quite simple, [...] can't it simply be miniaturized and used as a replacement of circuitry instead of used for lithography?
Define simple.
You do realise how good the technology you want to replace really has become?
MOSFET's are reliable switches that are really, really small.
They are so small, modern transistors are composed of a number of atoms that
humans can actually imagine.
There are few other technological items that are that small, and yet fullfil a
task with incredible reliability over a long period of time as an individual device.
I actually don't know of any right now.
If you can't miniaturize these cavities to sub micrometer dimensions, they would
have to be _incredibly_ fast switches to compensate for a sheer lack of number.
You know whats odd?
If this was previously thought to be impossible - you'd think it would have much larger implications.
Perhaps they should have said previously thought to be improbable?
What I want to know is: Will this do as much to improve the sound of my Bose speakers as Monster cables do?
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
no. you either get dumbed down, or you get equations.
shit's complicated. deal with it or deal with not understanding it.
It's a pretty dense article but, as far as I can tell, they're considering the motion of the photons in the plane transverse to the cavity axis as the particle movement. The problem is then two-dimensional in nature with the curvature of the mirrors directing photons back towards the cavity center. The situation is then analogous to a two-dimensional gas of particles confined by a central trapping potential.
In essence, the temperature is related to the transverse velocity of the intra-cavity photons. I believe that the cavity is spatially multi-mode and the quantum state of a photons is which spatial mode it's in and how it's evolving. Interaction with the dye particles randomizes (thermalizes) the quantum state of each photon, resulting in each photon engaging in a thermal random walk about the cavity's transverse modes. They then found the critical parameters for the "photon gas" to condense into occupying the lowest energy state (probably the fundamental Gaussian cavity mode).
Again, it's a pretty strange paper so I may have some details wrong. Fundamentally though, it's about modelling the transverse motion of photons in a cavity as particle motion, introducing thermal noise through scattering, then analyzing the dynamics by comparing to atomic motion and showing similar condensation at appropriate parameters. Quite an amazing paper.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?