[ExI] Light Interacting / Quantum Computing

[SR Ballard]

I nearly forgot what I originally got on my email to share with the list! Apologies if y’all have seen this/talked about it before: 

http://news.mit.edu/2018/physicists-create-new-form-light-0215

“Physicists create new form of light:Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons.”

Some quotes—
“But what if light particles could be made to interact, attracting and repelling each other like atoms in ordinary matter?”

“the team, led by Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, and Professor Mikhail Lukin from Harvard University, reports that it has observed groups of three photons interacting”

“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.”

I mean, I don’t really understand the implications (other than as literally stated) but it seemed interesting.
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