When light encounters a strong magical field it loses all sense of urgency. It slows right down. And on the Discworld the magic was embarrassingly strong, which meant that the soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or, as some would have it, like golden syrup.
Oops, that was Pratchett. The article is scarcely less weird though. Maybe even more so.
Regular light behaves like a wave, and sometimes like a particle, always travelling in a straight line. That's why your eyes can't see around corners or objects. But under extreme conditions, light can also act like a liquid, and actually flow around objects.
Bose-Einstein condensates are interesting to physicists because in this state, the rules switch from classical to quantum physics, and matter starts to take on more wave-like properties. They are formed at temperatures close to absolute zero and exist for only fractions of a second. But in this study, researchers reported making a Bose-Einstein condensate at room temperature by using a Frankenstein mash-up of light and matter.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-create-fifth-state-of-matter-liquid-light
Stapleton, the author of that Science Alert write-up is being a bit vague or tricky by saying that light can also act like a liquid.
ReplyDeleteThe research clearly concerns polaritons (strong coupling between photons and excitons). In such case, we shouldn't expect it to behave the same as for a photon field alone.