Seeing Light in a New Light: Scientists Create NeverBefore-Seen Form of Matter

Sep. 25, 2013 Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it.

Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led ! Harvard "rofessor of "h!sics Mikhail #ukin and MIT "rofessor of "h!sics $ladan $uletic have managed to coa% photons into inding together to form molecules -- a state of matter that, until recentl!, had een purel! theoretical& The work is descri ed in a 'eptem er () paper in Nature&

The discover!, #ukin said, runs contrar! to decades of accepted wisdom a out the nature of light& "hotons have long een descri ed as massless particles which don*t interact with each other -- shine two laser eams at each other, he said, and the! simpl! pass through one another& +"hotonic molecules,+ however, ehave less like traditional lasers and more like something !ou might find in science fiction -- the light sa er& +Most of the properties of light we know a out originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that the! do not interact with each other,+ #ukin said& +What we have done is create a special t!pe of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongl! that the! egin to act as though the! have mass, and the! ind together to form molecules& This t!pe of photonic ound state has een discussed theoreticall! for ,uite a while, ut until now it hadn*t een o served& +It*s not an in-apt analog! to compare this to light sa ers,+ #ukin added& +When these photons interact with each other, the!*re pushing against and deflect each other& The ph!sics of what*s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies&+ To get the normall!-massless photons to ind to each other, #ukin and colleagues, including Harvard post-doctoral fellow -fer .ister erg, former Harvard doctoral student Ale%e! /orshkov and MIT graduate students Thi ault "e!ronel and 0iu #iang couldn*t rel! on something like the .orce -- the! instead turned to a set of more e%treme conditions& 1esearchers egan ! pumped ru idium atoms into a vacuum cham er, then used lasers to cool the cloud of atoms to 2ust a few degrees a ove a solute 3ero& Using e%tremel! weak laser pulses, the! then fired single photons into the cloud of atoms& As the photons enter the cloud of cold atoms, #ukin said, its energ! e%cites atoms along its path, causing the photon to slow dramaticall!& As the photon moves through the cloud, that energ! is handed off from atom to atom, and eventuall! e%its the cloud with the photon& +When the photon e%its the medium, its identit! is preserved,+ #ukin said& +It*s the same effect we see with refraction of light in a water glass& The light enters the water, it hands off part of its energ! to the medium, and inside it e%ists as light and matter coupled together, ut when it e%its, it*s still light& The process that takes place is the same it*s 2ust a it more e%treme -- the light is slowed considera l!, and a lot more energ! is given awa! than during refraction&+ When #ukin and colleagues fired two photons into the cloud, the! were surprised to see them e%it together, as a single molecule& The reason the! form the never- efore-seen molecules4 An effect called a 1!d erg lockade, #ukin said, which states that when an atom is e%cited, near ! atoms cannot e e%cited to the same degree& In practice, the effect

means that as two photons enter the atomic cloud, the first e%cites an atom, ut must move forward efore the second photon can e%cite near ! atoms& The result, he said, is that the two photons push and pull each other through the cloud as their energ! is handed off from one atom to the ne%t& +It*s a photonic interaction that*s mediated ! the atomic interaction,+ #ukin said& +That makes these two photons ehave like a molecule, and when the! e%it the medium the!*re much more likel! to do so together than as single photons&+ While the effect is unusual, it does have some practical applications as well& +We do this for fun, and ecause we*re pushing the frontiers of science,+ #ukin said& +5ut it feeds into the igger picture of what we*re doing ecause photons remain the est possi le means to carr! ,uantum information& The handicap, though, has een that photons don*t interact with each other&+ To uild a ,uantum computer, he e%plained, researchers need to uild a s!stem that can preserve ,uantum information, and process it using ,uantum logic operations& The challenge, however, is that ,uantum logic re,uires interactions etween individual ,uanta so that ,uantum s!stems can e switched to perform information processing& +What we demonstrate with this process allows us to do that,+ #ukin said& +5efore we make a useful, practical ,uantum switch or photonic logic gate we have to improve the performance, so it*s still at the proof-of-concept level, ut this is an important step& The ph!sical principles we*ve esta lished here are important&+ The s!stem could even e useful in classical computing, #ukin said, considering the power-dissipation challenges chip-makers now face& A num er of companies -including I5M -- have worked to develop s!stems that rel! on optical routers that convert light signals into electrical signals, ut those s!stems face their own hurdles& #ukin also suggested that the s!stem might one da! even e used to create comple% three-dimensional structures -- such as cr!stals -- wholl! out of light& +What it will e useful for we don*t know !et, ut it*s a new state of matter, so we are hopeful that new applications ma! emerge as we continue to investigate these photonic molecules* properties,+ he said&