Photonic molecule

Photonic molecules are a natural form of matter which can also be made artificially in which photons bind together to form "molecules". These types of particles are found in sunlight. According to Mikhail Lukin, individual (massless) photons "interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass". The effect is analogous to refraction. The light enters another medium, transferring part of its energy to the medium. Inside the medium, it exists as coupled light and matter, but it exits as light.

Researchers drew analogies between the phenomenon and the fictional "lightsaber" from Star Wars.

Gaseous rubidium atoms were pumped into a vacuum chamber. The cloud was cooled using lasers to just a few degrees above absolute zero. Using weak laser pulses, small numbers of photons were fired into the cloud.

As the photons entered the cloud, their energy excited atoms along their path, causing them to lose speed. Inside the cloud medium the photons dispersively coupled to strongly interacting atoms in highly excited Rydberg states. This caused the photons to behave as massive particles with strong mutual attraction (photon molecules). Eventually the photons exited the cloud together as normal photons (often entangled in pairs).

The effect is caused by a so-called Rydberg blockade, which, in the presence of one excited atom, prevents nearby atoms from being excited to the same degree. In this case, as two photons enter the atomic cloud, the first excites an atom, but must move forward before the second can excite nearby atoms. In effect the two photons push and pull each other through the cloud as their energy is passed from one atom to the next, forcing them to interact. This photonic interaction is mediated by the electromagnetic interaction between photons and atoms.

The interaction of the photons suggests that the effect could be employed to build a system that can preserve quantum information, and process it using quantum logic operations.

The system could also be useful in classical computing, given the much-lower power required to manipulate photons than electrons.

It may be possible to arrange the photonic molecules in such a way within the medium that they form larger three-dimensional structures (similar to crystals).

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