Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
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Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#2> While photons normally have no mass and travel at 300,000 kilometers per second (the speed of light), the researchers found that the bound photons actually acquired a fraction of an electron’s mass. These newly weighed-down light particles were also relatively sluggish, traveling about 100,000 times slower than normal noninteracting photons.
300,000 / 100,000 = 3
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#3Is anyone else annoyed by the fact that while MIT news is good at creating interest in their stories, they are annoyingly watered down and never link back to the source paper they are paraphrasing? In this instance, they never mention the paper title even once.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#4Does this have implications for Maxwell's equations?
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#5> While photons normally have no mass and travel at 300,000 kilometers per second (the speed of light), the researchers found that the bound photons actually acquired a fraction of an electron’s mass. These newly weighed-down light particles were also relatively sluggish, traveling about 100,000 times slower than normal noninteracting photons. 300,000 / 100,000 = 3 "Relatively sluggish?" That seems more like profound…
3km/s is not sluggish and certainly not profoundly so. But it is relatively sluggish, compared to light. The choice of wording is fine.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#6The paper is "Observation of three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium"; details here:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6377/783
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#7Does this have implications for Maxwell's equations?
No, no changes to Maxell's equation, but I think it's easy to be mislead by the bad press coverage and title.
They only made a weird material where photons interact in a strange way, the photons "like" to be bound in triplets in that material.
There are other unusual materials, for example one special crystal can split a green photon into two infrared photons. Or the inverse, pick two photons and create a green photon with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_parametric_down-co...
The process in the article is different because it's temporal and it's only inside the material, but the split/unsplit make new photons than can live forever outside the material. (There are other differences ...)
Maxwell's Equation is only valid in vacuum, or when the material doesn't do anything interesting. The technical term is probably "linear materials". In nonlinear materials, weird things can happened and you can no long use the Maxwell's Equations.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#8> While photons normally have no mass and travel at 300,000 kilometers per second (the speed of light), the researchers found that the bound photons actually acquired a fraction of an electron’s mass. These newly weighed-down light particles were also relatively sluggish, traveling about 100,000 times slower than normal noninteracting photons. 300,000 / 100,000 = 3 "Relatively sluggish?" That seems more like profound…
3km/s is not sluggish and certainly not profoundly so. But it is relatively sluggish, compared to light. The choice of wording is fine.
Is "relatively sluggish" the proper wording for "5 order of magnitude slower" ?
The overnight backup was relatively sluggish last night, instead of 1 minute we expect it to take a little over 2 months.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#9Does this have implications for Maxwell's equations?
No, no changes to Maxell's equation, but I think it's easy to be mislead by the bad press coverage and title. They only made a weird material where photons interact in a strange way, the photons "like" to be bound in triplets in that material. There are other unusual materials, for example one special crystal can split a green photon into two infrared photons. Or the inverse, pick two photons and create a green photo…
I never got into nonlinear optics deeply. But I always thought that the nonlinear effects like frequency shifting work with the ordinary Maxwell equations, but with nonlinear material equations that have higher orders of susceptibility and permittivity in them.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
3km/s is not sluggish and certainly not profoundly so. But it is relatively sluggish, compared to light. The choice of wording is fine.
Is "relatively sluggish" the proper wording for "5 order of magnitude slower" ? The overnight backup was relatively sluggish last night, instead of 1 minute we expect it to take a little over 2 months.
I mean, in relation to all everyday objects, 3 kilometers per second is stupidly fast and not at all sluggish.
The overnight backup was relatively sluggish last night, instead of 1 microsecond it took a little over 100 milliseconds.