Lightsabers created by scientists

The Star Wars lightsabers have been a dream for many enthusiasts. Now, scientists have taken a step toward the invention of lightsabers by photon bunching within molecules.

In the recent issue of Nature, scientists from Harvard and MIT have demonstrated results of photon bunching within molecules that enable them to behave in such a way as the lightsabers from the Star Wars movies.

Photons usually are particles which interact weakly and in a mass-less manner. However, the scientists have managed to allow the photons to interact strongly with certain molecules through various entanglement pairs and in this way create a photon bunch that exhibit interaction with other matter as if the photons carried mass. In essence, the photons are bound to molecules.

According to the scientists, the results by the bound photons will interact with other matter similar to how lightsabers in Star Wars interact with matter. Of course, this is only the first step towards lightsabers and the scientists instead envisage applications including optical switches, deterministic photonic quantum logic and the generation of strongly correlated states of light to be more realistic applications than lightsabers.

Still though, never before, have photons been shown to exhibit properties resembling that of the lightsabers and for all Star Wars fans out there, this is definitely a good news toward their lightsaber dreams!