I really, really hoped that they'd at last confirmed the existance of octarine :)
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
#12Is 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.
And they tend to over-generalize - "While photons normally have no mass and travel at 300,000 kilometers per second (the speed of light)". The maximum speed of a photon is (currently?) around 300,000 kps but they often travel slower than this. Our fiber optics systems are coursing with photons that travel approximately 200,000 kps. The key results of this experiment is that the photons are interacting with each other ... and that they acquire mass.
The flashlight analogy is actually one that I not only described to people, but built a unique product around in the '90s. CyberFiber (yeah ... it was an tongue-in-cheek name for an engineering project that escaped into the marketing and sales department) was a duplex communication platform that used the same wave-length of light for both directions. It was a great marketing tool but required that your optical connections had very low reflectivity (and nobody likes to put coupling gel in their connectors).
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#13Does 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 came here to say that. I'm no expert in optics, much less quantum optics, but they seem to have created some kind of fancy material with unusual optical properties.
I'm very disappointed that MIT News themselves are so misleading. If I couldn't pirate the paper, I'd be left with the impression that they said they broke some kind of fundamental physics rule. They should leave heavy editorialization and sensationalisation for the news websites further down the chain.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#14Earlier 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.
Relatively is a modifier that here means "compared to something else". When someone says "relatively X", they are saying it is not actually "X" but it seems so in comparison. So they are saying that the combined particle isn't sluggish (because 3km/s is very much faster than a slug), but in comparison to light it _is_ sluggish. Hence, relatively sluggish.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#15Is 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.
Yeah, 'photons interacting' means nonlinear optics. That's not a new field, to put it mildly. MIT's PR people are not helping science (or the institute) gain credibility.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#16Is 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.
And they tend to over-generalize - "While photons normally have no mass and travel at 300,000 kilometers per second (the speed of light)". The maximum speed of a photon is (currently?) around 300,000 kps but they often travel slower than this. Our fiber optics systems are coursing with photons that travel approximately 200,000 kps. The key results of this experiment is that the photons are interacting with each other…
Photons travelling through fiber are still traveling at 300,000 km/s. It's just that they bounce of walls making their path longer and much more importantly than that, the medium is denser. Speed of light through glass is ~2e5 km/s, but photons are still travelling at 3e5 km/s. It's just that they hit atoms, energy gets absorbed and re emitted and so on. But photons always move at 3e5 km/s. The speed of light, that is the speed of a photon, is a constant.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#17The paper is "Observation of three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium"; details here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6377/783
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16392892
Edit: Previous submission, not discussion.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#18> 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…
An index of refraction of 3 is relatively high (like silicon carbide). Glass and a lot of optically transparent materials are only ~1.5.
But, if you look at IR transparent materials like silicon, gallium arsenide, or germanium, you can get up to and over 4.
More to the point, diode pumped solid state lasers are a common thing these days so photons interacting just isn't news... (edit) however if (and I can't tell without reading the original paper) it is actually the effect of photon mass (eg due to light density) on the photons itself, then it's a significant technical achievement! Just not how I'd have phrased it to a technical audience.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#19The paper is "Observation of three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium"; details here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6377/783
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16392892 Edit: Previous submission, not discussion.
There's actually no discussion there.
Re: Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
#20Is 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.
Yeah, 'photons interacting' means nonlinear optics. That's not a new field, to put it mildly. MIT's PR people are not helping science (or the institute) gain credibility.
The bury the real interaction (mediated via the mass in atoms not photon-photon) but the paragraph is in there,
>If another photon is simultaneously traveling through the cloud, it can also spend some time on a rubidium atom, forming a polariton — a hybrid that is part photon, part atom. Then two polaritons can interact with each other via their atomic component. At the edge of the cloud, the atoms remain where they are, while the photons exit, still bound together. The researchers found that this same phenomenon can occur with three photons, forming an even stronger bond than the interactions between two photons.