Scientists have already established that sometimes light behaves like a wave and other times like a particle, but a team of Princeton University researchers has uncovered a new behavior. According to a research brief, the team locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they are fixed in place, creating in essence solid light.
“It’s something that we have never seen before,” said Andrew Houck, an associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the researchers. “This is a new behavior for light.”
The breakthrough has applications for the development of exotic materials like room-temperature superconductors.
“We are interested in exploring – and ultimately controlling and directing – the flow of energy at the atomic level,” said Hakan Türeci, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and a member of the research team. “The goal is to better understand current materials and processes and to evaluate materials that we cannot yet create.”
One way to answer questions about quantum behavior is to build a quantum computer, but that technology still has a ways to go before it’s viable. An alternate approach is to build a system that directly simulates the desired quantum behavior. This is what the Princeton team is doing.
To build the device, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms coaxed to act as a single “artificial atom.” The artificial atom was positioned next to a superconducting wire containing photons. In accordance with the strange rules of quantum mechanics, the photons began to interact in some ways like particles.
“Here we set up a situation where light effectively behaves like a particle in the sense that two photons can interact very strongly,” Türeci said. “In one mode of operation, light sloshes back and forth like a liquid; in the other, it freezes.”
The team’s report appears in the Sept. 8 edition of journal Physical Review X.