Since lightsabers are purely fictitious, it’s a bit of stretch to say what was created in this experiment is really the same thing but the idea of converting light energy into a form that interacts with matter is there . Sorry if this has been posted already. Did a search on lightsaber in the past month and didn’t see anything.
It was hard to miss the disturbance in the force when scientists at Harvard and MIT declared they had turned light into molecules last week, prompting a collective air punch from the kind of folk who attend sci-fi conventions, for surely a working Jedi lightsaber was now close at hand . . . .
The electron doesn’t keep the energy for long, but falls back down, releasing energy back to the photon, which carries on its way. The process repeats as the photon moves through the cloud, essentially jumping from one atom to the next.
“The photon moves very slowly,” says Firstenberg. “We call it ‘slow light’.” Instead of hurtling through the vacuum at 300 million metres per second, the light slows down in the cold cloud of atoms to around 100 or 1,000 metres per second.
But the presence of the first antenna affects the second: it can’t take its turn to create an antenna until the first photon has moved on. The result is a couple of photons that cosy up into what the scientists call a photonic molecule.
“When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies,” Lukin said in a statement.