Researchers create lightsaber-like ‘photonic molecules’ | Science Recorder
A consortium of researchers from the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, led by Harvard physics professor Mikhail Lukin and his MIT counterpart Vladan Vuletic, forced photons to bind together and form molecules into a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical.
“Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other,” Lukin said. ”What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules. This type of photonic bound state has been discussed theoretically for quite a while, but until now it hadn’t been observed.”
When the researchers fired two photons into the cloud, they were observed exiting together, as a single molecule