
NIST Physicists Show ‘Molecules’ Made of Light May Be Possible - brisance
http://www.nist.gov/pml/div684/20150908lightsaber.cfm
======
avian
Here is the original paper on Arxiv:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03859](http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03859)

What the linked article fails to mention among all the fantasizing about light
sabers is that this kind of interaction is only possible in matter. These
"molecules made of light" can only exist when photons interact with atoms
while the light travels in a very special medium.

In vacuum, photon-photon interactions do not allow for any kind of bound
states like that.

~~~
rubidium
Just to echo your point: This is an interesting proposal more because of the
ability to use for photonic information applications (quantum gates and such)
then for light-sabers.

Fair warning to those looking at the original paper: I have my PhD as an
experimentalist in this field, and it took me a while to work through what
they were proposing :)

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larrik
Why do people think of lightsabers first? I think better control over light
leads to true holograms, primarily. Frankly, if holograms and lightsabers both
magically appeared tomorrow, I would lean towards holograms being more
important.

~~~
Loughla
The answer is simple, very, very simple.

Lightsabers would be more fun.

~~~
Retric
Holodeck vs Lightsabers, hmm I am sticking with Holodeck. :)

~~~
kenbellows
Holodeck implies lightsabers, I think

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amelius
Note that in the article linked above, no real matter is created, just
configurations that "act" as matter.

However, from [1]:

> [...] scientists at Imperial College London (including a visiting physicist
> from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) think they’ve
> figured out how to turn energy directly into matter [...] Their article in
> Nature Photonics proposes that a new kind of collider be built, one that
> smashes photons instead of protons, as at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
> where the Higgs boson was discovered last year.

Of course, this probably requires much more energy.

[1]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrodgers/2014/05/19/einstein-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrodgers/2014/05/19/einstein-
was-right-you-can-turn-energy-into-matter/)

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rbanffy
Are they seriously still running a Cold Fusion website?

Note: it'd be nice if the site could survive being on HN's cover. My past
experience with CF makes me thing it's a poor choice if you want that.

~~~
xlm1717
Believe it or not, there are still websites out there running Perl with CGI.
Not even Danser or Mojolicious, CGI.pm.

~~~
rbanffy
I wonder how many of those can survive being on the cover of HN.

~~~
Retric
Depends on HW, but that likely takes less resources than most websites. For
reference, an old CF website used to support 60k users and a few thousand page
views a second on a dual 450 MHz (Pentium III Xeon 450) cpu's. A modern CPU
could probably serve 10x that.

