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Friday 4 October 2013

Scientists bind photons to create new state of matter

The physicists were exploring the properties of photons – an elementary particle that is the most basic constituent of light and all other types of electromagnetic radiation – when they managed to create molecules formed from photons bound together.What they have done is that 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.To get the photons to interact with one another , physicists cooled rubidium atoms in a vacuum chamber to just a few degrees above absolute zero – the coldest possible temperature at which particles do not move. When two photons were fired at the cloud they did not pass through it and exit individually (as had been expected) but emerged on the other side as a single molecule. This was due to the Rydberg blockade, which states that when an atom is excited (has energy imparted to it) nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree.

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Scientific Universe

Scientific Universe