Brush up on your laser sword dueling skills because science has just come one more step closer to figuring out how to make a real life Light Saber.
Some physicists from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have discovered that they could make photons clump together if passed through a cloud of cooled gas.
A real world Light Saber was thought to be impossible to create and merely a weapon from a more civilized age in movies from George Lucas' imagination. However, building upon research and experiments with lasers since 2013, a new state of matter was discovered.
Normally, photons are unable to stick together because they do not have mass and travel at the speed of light. Also, because they do not have any charge like atom particles, they do not interact with each other.
However, physicists who were working on a way to develop photons to use in a quantum supercomputer found that if they shot the protons into a cloud of cooled rubidium atoms, the photons clumped together.
The principle behind this, reports say, is based on the Rydberg blockade. According to which, excited photons are unable to excite nearby atoms, but the researchers were able to create a go-around to this so that the photons would have to work together to force their way through the cloud of cold atoms in the experiment.
Although they have figured out a way to get photons to interact with each other despite not having any mass, Professor Mikhail Lukin of Harvard says they still have a long way to go into making the findings of this experiment work towards making a real Light Saber.
"When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies," he said.
The new series of experiments done by theoretical physicists from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) built upon the previous experiments of binding photons, by tweaking the process so that the photons travel at a specific distance beside each other.
Reports say that the configurations make the photons act very much like molecules and physicists may be able to someday make those molecules bind at special configurations to build more complex objects and states of light - perhaps even a working Light Saber!
Photo: Surrey County Council News | Flickr
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