Amid all sorts of fancy advancements in science, one of them is particularly revolutionary – turning light into both a solid and a fluid, or a strange material called a ‘supersolid,’ which researchers have just achieved for the first time in history.
As it happens, supersolids are mysterious materials that behave like both a solid and a fluid thanks to quantum effects, and now scientists have created an intriguing new type of supersolid from laser light, according to a New Scientist report published on March 5.
Indeed, turning light into an odd solid that can flow like a fluid will allow researchers to study it and better understand exotic quantum states of matter. As Dimitris Trypogeorgos at the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy stated: “We actually made light into a solid. That’s pretty awesome.”
He also added that Daniele Sanvitto, also at CNR, had demonstrated more than a decade ago how light could become a fluid. Now Trypogeorgos, Sanvitto, and their colleagues have used light to make not just any solid, but a quantum ‘supersolid,’ an important milestone in the field of condensed matter physics.
Light-based supersolid material
Per the report, supersolids simultaneously feature both zero viscosity and a crystal-like structure like the arrangement of atoms in salt crystals. As such, they have no equivalent outside of the quantum realm. Consequently, supersolids were previously only created in experiments using atoms cooled to extremely low temperatures, where otherwise insignificant quantum effects become predominant.
On the other hand, the most recent experiment involved the researchers replacing extremely cold atoms with the semiconductor aluminum gallium arsenide and a laser. Specifically, they shone the laser onto a small piece of the semiconductor that had a pattern of narrow ridges.
Intricate interactions between the light and the material eventually led to the formation of a type of hybrid particle called a polariton. The ridge pattern constrained how these ‘quasiparticles’ could move and what energies they could have in such a way that the polaritons constructed a supersolid.
According to Sanvitto, the team had to very accurately measure enough properties of this trapped and transformed light to prove it was both a solid and a fluid with no viscosity, which was a challenge as scientists had never created nor experimentally evaluated a supersolid made from light prior to this.
Could this be a step toward Star Trek-style shields, holodecks, and/or replicators, or a solidified bar of light straight out of a John W. Campbell sci-fi book? Perhaps a very tiny one. Nonetheless, it’s a giant breakthrough in the field of quantum physics.
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