• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

Building "molecules" out of photons

Coriolis

Si vis pacem, para bellum
Staff member
Joined
Apr 18, 2010
Messages
27,230
MBTI Type
INTJ
Enneagram
5w6
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150910141238.htm


[MENTION=9310]uumlau[/MENTION], [MENTION=9811]Coriolis[/MENTION] -- particularly interested in your comments. :D
The last sentence contains a key point that isn't made very clear, namely that the photons (moving at the speed of light, obviously) have to slow down considerably for much of this to work.

"It's a cool new way to study photons," he says. "They're massless and fly at the speed of light. Slowing them down and binding them may show us other things we didn't know about them before."

Not an insurmountable problem, as "slow light" has been a topic of optics research for at least a decade now. This article is a bit confusing on related topics it references, too. For instance, this is hardly the only way to get entangled photons for quantum cryptography, another research area that has been around for some time now. Anything that produces intimately linked photons can be used for this, such as a nonlinear second harmonic generation. Photon motion also effectively nixes the idea of a light saber also, unless there is some means of making the photons turn back at some point before they are "lost" to the environment. Then it is essentially a laser.

Interesting still. I look forward to reading more about it and seeing what it amounts to. As someone who works much closer to the application end of research, things like this can seem a bit "pie-in-the-sky", but then everything is until demonstrations get beyond the level of a lab table curiosity.
 

INTP

Active member
Joined
Jul 31, 2009
Messages
7,803
MBTI Type
intp
Enneagram
5w4
Instinctual Variant
sx
For instance, this is hardly the only way to get entangled photons for quantum cryptography, another research area that has been around for some time now.

Its not about getting the photons entangled, its about getting them to exhibit same characteristics of strong force that massive objects have and thus allowing them to be put together similar to how molecules are(but for now its just 2 photons instead of more of them, like a molecule would have).
 

Coriolis

Si vis pacem, para bellum
Staff member
Joined
Apr 18, 2010
Messages
27,230
MBTI Type
INTJ
Enneagram
5w6
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
For instance, this is hardly the only way to get entangled photons for quantum cryptography, another research area that has been around for some time now.
Its not about getting the photons entangled, its about getting them to exhibit same characteristics of strong force that massive objects have and thus allowing them to be put together similar to how molecules are(but for now its just 2 photons instead of more of them, like a molecule would have).
My comment pertained specifically to quantum cryptography, which does use photon entanglement. These photon "molecules" would appear to be one more way to obtain it.
 

INTP

Active member
Joined
Jul 31, 2009
Messages
7,803
MBTI Type
intp
Enneagram
5w4
Instinctual Variant
sx
My comment pertained specifically to quantum cryptography, which does use photon entanglement. These photon "molecules" would appear to be one more way to obtain it.

Yea but this method differs from entanglement in one very crucial way. Entanglement creates a bond that is not local(the two photons can be most likely in infinite distance from each others and maintain the bond), but this creates a bond that is local and brakes if they are apart. I wouldnt be surprised if this could be used to create an entanglement as well, but its not clear from the article. But yea, this could greatly benefit quantum computing in general, but most likely in other ways than entanglement does. I wonder if you could make these photon pairs that the article talks about and then make them entangled with other pairs, that would open a whole new are of quantum computing
 
Top