Liquid light shows social behaviour
Oct 2022, phys.org
Too many whats all in one place. I had to read this one carefully.
First of all, Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) have been a favorite over here at Network Address for a long time. It's one of those metaphysical-sounding things that doesn't behave how we expect. It's considered two-dimensional, a description used to organize lots of materials (like graphene, or twisted nanosandwiches) that behave so alien to our understanding of physics that they seem to be operating in another dimension.
Like other metamaterials, BECs also use super-something to describe their behavior, like superconductor, superinsulator, superfluid. They usually require absolute peace and quiet in order to do this magic condensation trick, which means it needs to be really cold, like absolute zero cold. But these scientists have figured out how to do it at room temperature, and that's is a pretty big deal.
In this case, the BEC is made of photons, hence "liquid light" -- they created a structure of microcavities and mirrors that condense photons in an optical medium of rhodamine dye and a thermo-responsive polymer, and turn them into a two-dimensional superfluid.
But wait, there's more -- when trying to explain the behavior of these super-photons, there is talk of the liquid "deciding" what to do, and of "social behavior". (Sociothermodynamics perhaps?)
I should mention that 1. the writer calls the photon fluid a liquid, but the scientists call it a gas, and 2. the writer quotes the scientists as using the term "social behavior", but that term is not in the paper itself, and I definitely don't understand this enough to get the analogy. (Although it may have something to do with "backreflection" like the backpropagating feedback loops characteristic of neural networks.)
via University of Twente, Netherlands: Mario Vretenar et al, Modified Bose-Einstein condensation in an optical quantum gas, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26087-0
Image credit: Quantum Thing, Getty Images, 2021
Post Script:
Here's some quantum eye-vitamins:
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| Image credit: Quantum Field Theory Liouville Bridge by Olena Shmahalo for Quanta Magazine, June 2021 |
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| Image credit: Quantum Field Theory Infinity Bridge by Olena Shmahalo for Quanta Magazine, June 2021 |
Just BECs in the news:
Researchers guide a single ion through a Bose-Einstein condensate
Jan 2021, phys.org
via University of Stuttgart: T. Dieterle et al. Transport of a Single Cold Ion Immersed in a Bose-Einstein Condensate, Physical Review Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.033401
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