Physicists reveal a 1D gas made of pure light
For the first time, physicists have created a one-dimensional gas made of pure light, and they want to use it to study how photons, or particles of light, behave on a scale. of quantum.
Scientists have created a new state of matter, called a photon gas, by firing a laser into a bright dye-filled container, causing the photons in the fields to cool and eventually die. connect. The researchers published their findings on Sept. 6 in the newspaper Natural Physics.
“To create these types of gases, we need to focus a lot of photons in a confined space and cool them at the same time,” the senior author learned. Frank Vewingerphysicist at the University of Bonn, said to a statement.
Photons are bosons, particles with “integer spin”, which means they can stay in the same position and space for a certain amount of time. When the gas of bosons is cooled to a temperature close to zero, all its particles lose energy, entering the same energy fields.
As we can only distinguish between similar particles in a gas cloud by looking at their energy levels, this balance has a profound effect: A cloud that once vibrated, vibrated, collided particles that form a heated gas and change, quantum mechanics feelings, perfectly similar, form an invisible form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
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Being in the form of a condensate makes the state of the particles in the gas very unstable. As a result, the spaces that each particle could occupy grew larger than the spaces between the particles themselves. Therefore, instead of invisible objects, the photons around the photon gas behave as if they were one giant particle.
Physicists have created photon gases in two dimensions before. But doing them in one way is more difficult.
“Things are a little different when we create a one-dimensional gas instead of a two-dimensional one,” Vewinger said. “The so-called temperature fluctuations occur in photon gases but they are so small in two dimensions that they have no real impact. However, on the other hand these fluctuations can – by figuratively – making big waves.”
To create a one-dimensional photon gas, the researchers filled a small, reflective container with a dye solution before firing a laser at it. The photons of the laser light bounced back and forth through the container until they collided with the dye molecules, which stripped them of their energy and caused them to clump together.
By using a transparent polymer on the reflective walls of the container, the researchers were able to change the way they reflected the light so that it could be precisely covered in one direction – or line.
“These polymers act as a kind of gutter, but in this case for light,” the lead author Kirankumar Karkihalli Umesha doctoral student at the University of Bonn, said in the statement. “The weaker this gas is, the more monotonous the gas is.”
By studying their newly created 1D photon gas, the researchers confirmed that it behaves very differently from its 2D counterpart. Unlike 2D photon gases, the temperature fluctuations of their 1D cousins prevent them from completely sinking into certain regions. This causes a partial transition between the laser light and its condensate form that is “expelled” through the gas, like ice water that has not completely frozen, according to the researchers.
Investigating how the photon gas varies across dimensions could help researchers discover unknown quantum optical effects, the researchers said.
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