Solid light?
“Solid light photons repel each other as electrons do. This means we can control photons, opening the door to new kinds of faster computers,” says Dr Greentree. “Many real-world problems in quantum physics are too hard to solve with today’s computers. Our discovery shows how to replicate these hard problems in a system we can control and measure.”
He says photons of light do not normally interact with each other. In contrast, the electrons used by computers strongly repel each other.
The team has shown theoretically how to engineer a ‘phase transition’ in photons, leading them to change their state so that they do not interact with each other. “A phase transition occurs when something changes its state, for example when water becomes ice,” says team member Jared Cole. “Usually, photons flow freely, but in the right circumstances, they repel each other, and form a crystal.”
Looks to me like there’s a typo in that last paragraph; it says the phase transition produces photons that do not interact with each other, when the whole point of the article is that in solid light the photons do interact with each other.
But anyway, this sounds…well, brilliant.
