Researchers Working On Crystallizing Light

An anonymous reader writes Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter. The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place. "It's something that we have never seen before," said Andrew Houck, one of the researchers. "This is a new behavior for light."

Comments

The power of bad reporting

[gurps_npc]

If you read the article, the scientists are not converting energy into matter.

Instead, they have caused some photons to be entangled so that they gain some of the properties of "liquid or solids". Not all the properties, not even the properties of a crystal, instead some of the properties of 'liquid or solid"

This article is just about one of the worst dumming down of science I have read. It was built up to sound 'click worthy', mainly be ignoring the actual research. They don't even use the word "entangled".

Re:photons are not particles

[Nemyst]

We can define a photon just fine thank you. It's not because it doesn't fit in a human-scale model of comprehension that there's something inherently fuzzy or mysterious about the wave/particle duality. A photon is both a wave and a particle, exhibiting the properties of the former in certain scenarii and the latter in other scenarii.

Your analogy is also incorrect. A photon is an electromagnetic wave, it's not a vibration propagating through a medium. An ocean wave without the ocean is nothing, it's energy being transmitted through movement of the medium (same as sound). A photon can exist in a vacuum.

Re:This article makes no sense whatsoever

[bill_mcgonigle]

In fairness to the writer of the simply hideous article, which is an amazing compendium of misleading nonsense, irrelevancy and outright falsehood, the research team seem to be speaking in a private language.

No kidding ... I was thinking as I was reading it, "wow, this is the worst-written paper I've read in a long time". They seem to go to lengths to make it as baroque, dense, and devoid of semantically (if not syntactically) valid prose as possible.

I don't just mean that it's very technical - they seem to be engaged in active denial of communication. I spent a little time teasing apart the sections I was most interested in, but that's the opposite of the job of a paper.

I know the stereotype is that "nerds can't write" but really many of the best papers in physics are also fun to read.