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

kind of reminds me,...

[Selur]

of the power cubes from the old transformer series *gig*

Been able to buy this for Years

[Anonymous Coward]

Just go to the local grocery & get some "Crystal Light" tastes pretty good too.

Finally!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can now run faster than light! :)

Re:Finally!!

[UnknownSoldier]

Considering light was slowed down to zero a few years back, you are now just catching up to it? :)

Re:Finally!!

[Half-pint HAL]

Considering light was slowed down to zero a few years back, you are now just catching up to it? :)

Well given it had a 10 millisecond headstart, he'll be catching up for a fair wee while....

Re:Finally!!

[Salgat]

Honestly, I'm just getting sick of going to Slashdot comments and seeing the top posts all being jokes instead of insightful and interesting discussions. On this submission alone I see 3 of the top 5 posts are just jokes; white noise that I have to sift through to find actual information.

Things come to mind

[Anonymous Coward]

How many photons can you store in a cubic cm? Could you then release those photons on demand? How much energy could you store in this sort of a system? Can you use it as a battery? Could it be weaponized? Imma charging mah lazers?

Re:Things come to mind

[fahrbot-bot]

How many photons can you store in a cubic cm? Could you then release those photons on demand? How much energy could you store in this sort of a system? Can you use it as a battery? Could it be weaponized?

The British already did this in 1854 - duh. There were even poems about it.

Re:Things come to mind

[Bob the Super Hamste]

My best guess would be yes you could use it as a battery and it would almost certainly be weaponized. As for how much energy could be stored my guess would be it would be the Planck Energy * (1cm^3 / Planck Volume) and I don't really feel like doing that calculation but it looks like it would be a lot given that the Planck Energy is about equal to the energy in an average car's tank of fuel and the Planck Volume is really small ~4^-104 m^3.

Pending lawsuit...

[Oarsman]

Crystal Light is going to sue for trademark infringement. #obligatorypun

Re:Pending lawsuit...

[Khyber]

Pepsi might sue. I don't think Crystal Light is going to do much of anything!

Frozen in an excited state. -- That's impossible!

[Myself]

(obligatory Real Genius line.)

Sounds familiar

[HangingChad]

Sounds like someone figured out the basis for the holodeck on the Enterprise.

Re:Sounds familiar

[kheldan]

Except that in NextGen Star Trek (24th century and later), the holodeck uses photons restrained by force fields, totally different technology than what they're experimenting with here (I think).

Re:Sounds familiar

[omnichad]

How do photons restrained by force fields make it to someone's eye?

Re:Sounds familiar

[kheldan]

How the hell should I know? There's a reason it's called science fantasy after all. How do you generate a coherent graviton beam? What's the operating principles of a Heisenberg Compensator?

Re:Sounds familiar

[Zalbik]

What's the operating principles of a Heisenberg Compensator?

Easy: "I'm not in the meth business. I'm in the empire business."

I may be confusing Heisenberg's though.

Re:Sounds familiar

[RavenLrD20k]

Ok... Just for Hypothetical plausibility: They don't. The photons restrained by force fields create the matter from "nothing". Unrestrained photons that bounce off the restrained ones are what make it to someone's eye to give the person the vision of the environment simulated around them. Again, not saying this is the official explanation... just a plausible one.

Re:Sounds familiar

[Half-pint HAL]

Maybe it's the photons that bounce off the photons that you see? And maybe the force-field is there to stop those photons getting knocked out of place by every stray photon? Or maybe the Star Trek series is just cheap pulp that doesn't deserve the huge cult-like following it has....

Re:Sounds familiar

[Kevin Fishburne]

I'm guessing the force fields are what allow a hologram to punch you in the face and the photons are what allow you to see the fist coming at you. They're probably generated separately and synchronized for realism. They never really explain in detail how holographic projections work in Star Trek, other than "photons and force fields" and "holoprojectors", which have a limited range and need to be placed strategically (the strategy isn't explained, either). The worst sin of course is how they fail to adequately explain how two people can get farther apart from each other than the diameter of the holodeck/suite, and yet in Voyager talk about expanding the size of the holodeck to accommodate larger simulations. I suppose it's no surprise that the most "holy shit this is awesome" piece of technology in Star Trek is the most difficult to rationally explain.

Re:Sounds familiar

[Kevin Fishburne]

That is an excellent solution to the proximity problem. They'd also have to use inertial dampeners to simulate the effect of movement when not actually moving (the opposite of what they normally do) and variable gravity plating. I wonder if the holodeck can localize pressure and humidity, or if it's just the entire room. If the safeties were turned off and there was a serious hull breach in one of two shuttlepods how would the holoprojection or deck mechanics depressurize only one of the participants? Perhaps the safeties only pertain to force field injuries and more difficult properties are performed globally. Localizing scent, for example, would be difficult without hiding little scent dispensers. There was a Voyager episode (the one where the holodecks were expanded to encompass multiple decks) where a holodeck-generated explosion actually blew out other parts of the ship. The holodeck concept is awesome and fun to talk about.

Re:Sounds familiar

[Half-pint HAL]

Quoting what is presumably a Star Trek reference at someone who thinks Star Trek is cheap pulp fiction doesn't discourage the idea that Star Trek fans are cult-like....

Re:Holodeck!

[bobbied]

Holograms and lightsabers by 2025. (Flying cars by 2026).

Linux on the desktop this year!

Hard Light Bridges

[Anonymous Coward]

And coming soon: Excursion funnels!

Re:Hard Light Bridges

[jep77]

I read that as Excursion Funerals. Twice. It really sounds like a good idea though. I have to update my will now.

Re:Hard Light Bridges

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I read that as Excursion Funerals. Twice. It really sounds like a good idea though. I have to update my will now.

"Excretion Funerals" here.

Same disease, smells worse...

Discworld

[volvox_voxel]

This sound like something out of one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels..

The Switch

[chinton]

We've secretly replaced their regular coffee with light crystals... Let's see if they notice.

Sounds like technobabble

[Russ1642]

It sounds like one of those articles scientists put in journals to discredit their peer review process. They make up a bunch of crap that sounds all sciency and then laugh when it gets published.

Re:Sounds like technobabble

[dkman]

I agree.

From the article:

To build their machine, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms engineered to act as a single “artificial atom.” They placed the artificial atom close to a superconducting wire containing photons. By the rules of quantum mechanics, the photons on the wire inherit some of the properties of the artificial atom – in a sense linking them.

They use a lot of "artificially" in the article. And I like the big jump of "By the rules of quantum mechanics".

LIGHT SABRE

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right, here comes my Light Sabre

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:The power of bad reporting

[neoritter]

Well of course they didn't, I don't think their research had anything to do with Disney.

Re:The power of bad reporting

[tsa]

Indeed it was so bad that I stopped reading halfway. The person who wrote this clearly didn't get anything of what the scientists are trying to do in this project.

Re:The power of bad reporting

[EmagGeek]

Lighten up, Francis. This is Slashdot. Nobody expects good journalism or even semi-accurate plagiarism here.

This article makes no sense whatsoever

[MobyDisk]

This article makes no sense. It talks about "crystallizing" light but never says what it means. Then it goes into quantum computers. In the middle, it links to a journals.aps.org article that doesn't even contain the word "crystal" in it. All the quotes are vague things like "It’s something that we have never seen before" which doesn't help either.

I thought the Slashdot comments might help, but they are all just jokes. So I take it no one else understands what this article is about either.

Re:This article makes no sense whatsoever

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a science news blog. were you expecting more than the abstract and a commentary?
go here:
http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.031043

Re:This article makes no sense whatsoever

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bad reporting.

This has been in the news a while back, and was dubbed "photonic crystals" then too (but that term was already in use for something completely different).

Basically, you start with a quantum mechanical system (usually a bunch of atoms) that has very few degrees of freedom (some kind of potential trap). This is the "crystal" part.

Then you add a number of photons to that system. The photons couple with the electrons in the lattice. Because of the restricted degrees of freedom, only very few interactions are possible. When a photon interacts with the lattice, this adds even more restrictions on the system, in such a way that a second interacting photon will feel the effect of the first.

So one photon interacts with the lattice, and the lattice interacts in turn with a second photon. Because of the restricted degrees of freedom, it will appear as if the first photon directly interacts with the second.

That's the basis. It seems they expanded on this, and created more complex pseudo photon-photon interactions, with more photons.

Re:This article makes no sense whatsoever

[radtea]

So I take it no one else understands what this article is about either.

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. Even their "popular summary" is difficult for a physicist who has done some work in quantum fundamentals to understand.

It appears they have created a fairly standard state in which microwave photons are strongly interacting with each other via a superconductor. Their is for some reason they do not explain and seem to take for granted, a phase transition in the system's behaviour as the number of photons drops.

This may (or may not) be related to the "phase/photon-number uncertainty principle", which is analogous to the usual position/momentum uncertainty principle: you can know the precise classical phase of a many-photon beam or you can know the number of photons in it, but not both at the same time. As the total number of photons goes down the uncertainty in the the number of photons goes down, increasing the uncertainty in the phase (that's one fairly hand-waving way to think about it, at least.)

After the phase transition the system is in some weird quantum state that they liken to Schrodinger's cat, but since Schrodinger's cat is in a perfectly ordinary quantum superposition that knowledge adds exactly nothing to our understanding of what the state actually is. Presumably they are referring to some particular state that is currently well-known within quantum information theory, but by presenting the idea to a lay audience without elaboration they simply add to the overall sense of confusion and, uh, incoherence.

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.

photons are not particles

[globaljustin]

we barely can define a photon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

it exhibits "wave/particle duality"...it's not like a super-ball that's bouncing around a room...it's not matter...so how could these researchers possibly say that something that has no resting mass can be 'frozen in place'...

it's a wave...you can't "freeze" a wave...you freeze **the ocean**

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:photons are not particles

[Em Adespoton]

Actually, what I found intriguing about the article is that photons' "physical" properties appear to be relational, which goes a long way to explaining how they can behave as waves AND particles. It kind of seems like photons are really the relationship between the physical universe and the Higgs field, and are very much quantum. As such, photons are trainable based on what they interact with, and how they are measured. This has interesting ramifications for future modeling and even future means of photon measurement. Add this to the state change ability discovered a few months back, and our toolkit for understanding the universe has suddenly got a LOT more interesting.

Re:photons are not particles

[Anonymous Coward]

which goes a long way to explaining how they can behave as waves AND particles.

Quantum mechanics has explained how photons act like waves and particles for nearly hundred years now. Wave functions explain photons just fine in such situations covering both when it acts like particles and when it acts like waves. In some cases you can make simplifications to the equations and get stuff that looks like classical particle behavior, and otherwise you get wave behavior, but it is still one underlying theory and model. It is no different than how Einstein's relativities can give you Newtonian physics in mundane situations where the math simplifies a lot.

It kind of seems like photons are really the relationship between the physical universe and the Higgs field

The research here has pretty much nothing to do with the Higgs field. Photons don't directly interact with the Higgs field, and the Higgs boson is chargeless, so doesn't directly interact with electromagnetism.

...and are very much quantum.

Photons are as quantum as any other microscopic thing, in that there every day situations where quantum behavior can't be seen and is overwhelmed by macroscopic effects, and there are careful experiments that can bring out quantum behavior.

Add this to the state change ability discovered a few months back, and our toolkit for understanding the universe has suddenly got a LOT more interesting.

This doesn't fundamentally change our understanding of the universe or change how we fundamentally model things like photons. It changes our understanding of the implications of existing models in more complex situations.

Re:photons are not particles

[globaljustin]

this is what i was getting at when I said "you don't freeze a wave, you freeze the ocean"

talk about photons being the relationship between the electromagnetic field and the "physical universe"

I didn't explain it as precisely but this is how I would have stated it if i was smarterer

i guess this is just another example of me hating pop-science headlines...this stuff is cool enough just for what it is!

Re:photons are not particles

[u38cg]

Your comment sounded kinda insightful, apart from your use of a made up word 'scenarii'.

Re:photons are not particles

[Doghouse13]

Your comment sounded kinda insightful, apart from your use of a made up word 'scenarii'.

I mean - do you mean, as opposed to your own made-up word, 'kinda'? Or your made-up phrase, 'made up', come to that?

(Ob pedantry: Actually, of course, as language seems to be hard-wired into people, but the actual words clearly aren't, every word we ever write or say is ultimately 'made-up' - it's just that groups of people who speak the 'same' language tend to be more-or-less in agreement on what words to use. 'Scenarii' is an abnormal plural that's almost certainly down to a misunderstanding of the singular word's origins; but it's clear what it means, and if enough people start using it, it will gain enough traction to be seen as 'correct'.)

((How the heck does something like the parent get up-voted 'Insightful'?))

Re:photons are not particles

[u38cg]

Oh, it's quite easy to get the mods to find your comments insightful. Generally something pedantic will do it, especially if it involves something rude and untrue abut women.

Actually, GP, had the right etymology - in Italian it would be scenari - but he did blatantly make up a plural that is not used in English. Hypercorrectness is a fault, not a virtue. It confuses your audience and leads them to doubt your accuracy. Kinda silly, really.

Re:Marvel did it first! DAZZLER!

[Chris Mattern]

But hopefully without the disco this time.

Nice cut and paste

[Charliemopps]

Nice job linking to an "Blog" that was quite literally cut and pasted from a legit article:
phys.org/news/2014-09-solid-previously-unsolvable-problems.html

Expect the one posted here to get a DMCA request in short order.
Looking at their other "Blogs" it appears this entire site is nothing but cut and pasted stories from various science sites.

Re:Nice cut and paste

[ColdWetDog]

Well, it does say "Science Blog - Straight from the Source". So what were you expecting?

And, like everyone else, I can't make heads or tails out of it either, but at least your source has a cool picture.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod ..

[volvox_voxel]

Crystal light? .. Reminds me of of the poem by Eugene Field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe — Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew. "Where are you going, and what do you wish?" The old moon asked the three. "We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we!" Said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song, As they rocked in the wooden shoe, And the wind that sped them all night long Ruffled the waves of dew. The little stars were the herring fish That lived in that beautiful sea — "Now cast your nets wherever you wish — Never afeard are we"; So cried the stars to the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

All night long their nets they threw To the stars in the twinkling foam — Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe, Bringing the fishermen home; 'Twas all so pretty a sail it seemed As if it could not be, And some folks thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed Of sailing that beautiful sea — But I shall name you the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, And Nod is a little head, And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies Is a wee one's trundle-bed. So shut your eyes while mother sings Of wonderful sights that be, And you shall see the beautiful things As you rock in the misty sea, Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

Here is the Silly Symphony version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Wynken, Blynken, and Nod ..

[jfengel]

I don't know why, but to me it comes out oddly comforting when Slashdot reformats it as prose.

This just in...

[in10se]

This just in... faster than light speed is now possible by dropping a clump of light crystals on the floor and then running away.

You know the rules of physics

[atari2600a]

Pics or it didn't crystallize!

Solaranite

[Kyogreex]

"Now you can arrange the total destruction of the entire universe served by our sun: The only explosion left is the Solaranite."

John W. Campbell got there first

[nani popoki]

I guess I'm the only one here old enough to remember John W. Campbell's space operas in which he postulated two materials made from "crystallized light". One material, lux, was a super-strong, transparent, insulator. The other, relux, was a perfectly reflecting superconductor. Look up his novel "Islands of Space.

APRIL FOOLS!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Seriously? A crystal?

Right. Can they get it to gaseous form first? :-) Or do they sublimate straight from pure energy, right to solid state?

Also, point of clarification (pun intended): Does this crystalline light need to be first observed as a particle, or will a wave observation prove to be equally effective in achieving desired result?

Re:APRIL FOOLS!

[ultranova]

Can they get it to gaseous form first? :-)

Light is gaseous, ideal gas in fact: photons don't interact with each other but will simply bounce off the walls of a container.

Re:APRIL FOOLS!

[Anonymous Coward]

photons don't interact with each other

In a vacuum, at low intensities. Within media photons can interact through all sorts of nonlinear processes at varying levels of intensity depending on the medium. Even within a vacuum photons can nonlinearly interact, although that requires intensities far beyond what has been achieved in a lab so far, and barely occurs to our knowledge in nature (one example is interaction between a magnetar's magnetic field scattering high energy gamma rays).

Re:APRIL FOOLS!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Gaseous? So it is an element. ARRGH!

Re:APRIL FOOLS!

[michelcolman]

In an ideal gas, the molecules collide elastically with each other. I'm no expert, but that's what I remember from university 20 years ago and Wikipedia seems to confirm it. Photons don't collide with each other afaik.

already use them

[slashmydots]

If you throw them at the undead, you get a +10 radiant damage bonus too.

Pictures?

[__aagmrb7289]

Is anyone else annoyed that the article doesn't even have any pictures? Your headline talks about crystallized light! Where are the images of this wonder? Oh right - the headline has nothing to do with the science. Nothing to see here! (literally)

Bad reporting, but....

[slew]

Actually, it is an interesting result. AFAICT, they have taken one of the ideas that came out of quantum optics (the JCM) and created an experimental system that apparently allowed for coupled JCM system to form a simple lattice (probably where they misappropriated the "crystal" metaphor from).

As for what this is good for? Seems like right now it's too simple, so basically nothing, But researchers anticipate this idea will find use as a quantum simulator for studying dissipation and/or decoherence from quantum systems that are far from the equilibrium state. The basic idea seems to be that in this highly coherent JCM lattice system, you can have tight control of tunneling and similar non-linear phenomena. It may make it easier to simulate quantum emergent behavior (quantum effects that show up in macroscopic phenomena).

Using this technique as a quantum simulator tool might be compared to using an analog computer to quickly simulate differential equations more efficiently than a digital computer. For those that like a car analogy, it might be compared to using a tricked out multi-barrel carburetor to study venturi/Bernoulli equations rather than retask your ignition timing / fuel injection computer to do this...

Silmaril?

[georgewad]

Pah! Feanor did this way back in the Years of the Trees.
No elves, not as bright as a Silmaril. Lame.

Re:Red Dwarf reference too..

[wonkey_monkey]

Close, but I think it was "hard light."

First commercial application...

[Half-pint HAL]

Oil of Olay now comes with added liquid light complex to give your skin a warm glow.

Re:Red Dwarf reference too..

[afaiktoit]

yeah, something like that

Something we've never seen before

[jitterman]

Could be because the photons are locked in place...

Science fiction comes true

[scotts13]

Back in the mid-40's, John W Campbell wrote a series of science fiction stories featuring "lux metal" which was basically matter composed of photons instead of electrons, protons, and neutrons. It had, shall we say, "interesting" properties. Wasn't easy to manufacture, either.

I like that

[Whiteox]

I like that! Imagine constructing images out of photons.... - oh wait.....

This is not new

[EmagGeek]

Crystal light has been around for a very long time.

Re:This is not new

[ArcadeMan]

Mod parent +9000 funny.

Wait, crystallized light?

[ArcadeMan]

What's next, chocobos?

more dumb jokes

[cellocgw]

Just wait until they create Photon-Nine. The entire universe will freeze! aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

Re: Holodeck!

[beastofburdon]

No it didn't, we call them hipsters. Along with sudo Linux(Android) we got sudo nerds.

kind of reminds me,...

[Dumpsterskunk]

I was immediately reminded of that very strange story (but all of his stories were very strange) by J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World (1966) - where this sort of thing was mysteriously occurring on its own in a jungle somewhere in Cameroon.