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In the story "The light is like water" Gabriel García Márquez tells the adventures of Totó and Joel, two children who, at night, break the bulbs of their house and navigate between the flows of light that flow from it. 19659002]
"A stream of golden light as fresh as water began to come out of the broken bulb, and they let it sink until the level reached four palms. " Then they cut the power, took the boat out and sailed The scene, so fantastic that it is, is not far from reality.
Scientists who study quantum phenomena have shown that light, under particular conditions, can behave as a flowing liquid and ripples around obstacles that it encounters, such as the current of a river between stones
How do they do that?
"Liquid light" is a very particular substance. It is neither a solid nor a plasma and does not behave exactly like a liquid or a gas.
Scientists call it Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and consider it the "fifth state of matter"
. the particles synchronize and move in unison, forming a "superfluid".
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"It looks like any other liquid or gas, but with special properties, a Daniele Sanvitto, a researcher at the Institute of Nanotechnology of the United States. Italy
The superfluids do not create waves and undergo neither friction nor viscosity.
collective behavior, "explains Sanvitto." It's like a group of dancers doing the same moves or who walk at the same time. "
Thus, a common liquid, when meeting a wall, would bounce, but a superfluid, like liquid light, would circulate along the wall
" If you send a jet of these against a wall, it will move in any direction and will eventually reconnect after the obstacle, "says Sanvitto.
Why
Until there is a few years, the superfluids could be reached only at times temperatures close to absolute zero (-273 ° C), but Sanvitto and his colleagues managed to produce liquid light at room temperature in 2017.
they achieved this goal by using mixtures of light and matter, called polaritons.
"This is the first step to have applications of this liquid in everyday life," says Sanvitto
. only small is but researchers see great potential for transmitting lean information and energy.
An example would be the creation of optical computers, which can take advantage of the interaction of light particles without the problem of dissipation or heating of common computers. This will make them much faster and consume less energy.
This technology could also revolutionize the handling of lasers and solar panels. Even as scientist Michio Kaku mentioned in an interview to This Week in Science, some believe that in the future, the OCI could lay the foundation for the teleportation of objects.
For the moment, this is only possible in the imagination. it was once in the history of García Márquez …
Source: BBC
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