Laser Creates Quantum Whirlpool

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 18, 2014 @08:15AM from the don't-fall-in dept.

Quantus347 writes: Physicists at The Australian National Univ. (ANU) have engineered a spiral laser beam and used it to create a whirlpool of hybrid light-matter particles called polaritons. Polaritons are hybrid particles that have properties of both matter and light. The ability to control polariton flows in this way could aid the development of completely novel technology to link conventional electronics with new laser- and fiber-based technologies. Polaritons form in semiconductors when laser light interacts with electrons and holes (positively charged vacancies) so strongly that it is no longer possible to distinguish light from matter.

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I thought the distinction was arbitrary already by i+kan+reed · 2014-11-18 08:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

Polaritons form in semiconductors when laser light interacts with electrons and holes (positively charged vacancies) so strongly that it is no longer possible to distinguish light from matter.
I thought the distinctions made already are already mostly ones of convenience and scale: matter is slow and heavy enough to mostly be possible to model as point masses, while light is fast, light, and numerous enough to be more convenient to treat as non-discrete energy than as individual photons.