And researchers think they know how to do it

Sep 11, 2015 16:24 GMT  ·  By

It will probably take them a while to get around to actually doing it, but researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology might turn out to be the daredevils to forge the first lightsabers the world has ever seen. We're talking the real deal, not movie props.

In a new study in the journal Physical Review Letters, the scientists, together with their collaborators at the University of Maryland and other research institutions, detail their work showing that, at least in theory, it is possible to join photons together into light molecules of sorts.

Admittedly, one light molecule is a far cry from a Jedi sword. All the same, it would be a step in the right direction. Mind you, cooking up such so-called light molecules would pave the way for the development of many other objects made from photons, not just swords.

“We're learning how to build complex states of light that, in turn, can be built into more complex objects,” says researcher Alexey Gorshkov.

It's been done before, sort of

Some time ago, in September 2013, Caltech, Harvard and MIT scientists joined brains and, in a series of experiments, managed to compel photons to interact with one another in a carefully controlled environment.

Before this research project, photons were thought of as massless particles that could not and would not interact with each other. When researchers got them to do just that, what they essentially did was create a never-before-seen state of matter.

When the Caltech, Harvard and MIT announced their work, they called the pairs of photons that they tricked into interacting with one another in laboratory conditions photonic molecules. Why is it then that the National Institute of Standards and Technology team say light molecules are still no more than theoretical talk?

Well, that's because the so-called photonic molecules described by scientists in 2013 comprised superimposed photons that would deflect and push each other. They were bound together but didn't act quite like molecules.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology team say that, according to their calculations, altering the parameters of the binding process that researchers experimented with a couple of years back should make it possible to bind photons so that they would travel side by side, at a specific distance from one another.

“The arrangement is akin to the way that two hydrogen atoms sit next to each other in a hydrogen molecule. It’s not a molecule per se, but you can imagine it as having a similar kind of structure,” the scientists explain.

“This is the first time anyone has shown how to bind two photons a finite distance apart,” specialist Alexey Gorshkov goes on to detail.

Lightsabers are not the end goal

They might be super cool, but lightsabers are not the end goal of such experiments into coaxing photons to cosy up to each other and birth light molecules. Rather, the reason scientists are interested in creating photonic molecules is to advance modern technologies.

Communication technology, high-definition imaging and many other modern technologies are based on light and researchers think they might manage to improve them should they find a formula to devise interactions between photons.

Now that they've shown that, at least in theory, photons can be made to move side by side, the National Institute of Standard and Technology plan to try and put this idea of theirs to the test.

We could have lightsabers in a few years
We could have lightsabers in a few years

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Scientists think they know how to make photons travel side by side
We could have lightsabers in a few years
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