Exchange of light and matter, Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news90077438.html

http://www.physorg.com/news90077438.html

After reading this and so many other articles on so many sciencific topics in physorg.com I"m inclined to think that this has to be a brave new era [in the best sense of the term] in the development of all scientific endeavor first, and by extension, of the human mind. So many breakthroughs are happening in so many areas that shed light on old problems [while creating new ones] that it"s hard to avoid the impression that the people involved in this enterprise must experience a sense of giddy exhilaration at the possibilities opening up every day to those in a position to understand them and make a contribution to them.

I expect with further research that it is NOT a re-creation of the original photon(s). Simply a way of transfering the amplitude and phase of a light pulse (or a photon) into an environment that enables the emission of a NEW photon that has corresponding attributes to the original input. It is nonsense to suggest that the ORIGINAL is re-created.

Hi All,

I find this phenomenon a great vindication of the concept that light and matter are just two different spin states. Light is a boson and matter are fermions... there are laws which connect one with the other. Bright Matter Solitons are pseudo-particles and this may carry information in the form of qubits from one point in space to another. Of course the integrity of this process may be very finely balanced but I think it is possible to transfer the qubit without loss. It seems plausible that the Bose Einstein Condensate is transferring induced Orbital Angular Momentum between points. A suitable "holographic interference defect" could be used to produce a "doughnut field" in the BEC for the light to be "twisted" into what looks remarkably like a "smoke ring". A Holographic Defect may look something like this...

The BEC slows the light and converts it to a pseudo-fermion by adding the spin to the co-moving photons as they pass the defect.

Click to enlarge...
Obviously this is an "adaption" of a concept used elsewhere. This is now "partially" a matter wave. The defects also carry "topological charge" and you can read about these phenomena here...
Light Beams in High-Order Modes
This phenomenon has been attempted before (as you can see this is not a new idea but perhaps the first successful attempt)...

This is not the same experiment but it is "instructive".

Have a look here on Taco Visser's Homepage...
Taco Visser Homepage
Taco Visser's Journal Page

Look up Optical Vortexes and underspecified Null Electromagnetic Fields and the branch of Physics called "Singular Optics".

The optical equivalent to Falaco Solitons.

If you are "really interested" look up this thread that has been progressing for some time... Problem with the two slit experiment, Observing later

Cheers

This post has been edited by Good Elf on Feb 8 2007, 04:28 PM

Its a fallacy that a conversion between light and matter occurs. The experiment shows only that the information that describes the original light can be transmiited by a travelling matter wave through a BEC and subsequently the information can be used to generate light that has properties similar to the original input. To suggest that light to matter conversion occurs is fantasy and poor science.

Can I shine light through a BEC and get a BBQ chicken output?

You may ask where the original light of the universe came from. Original matter had to radiate original light. Light goes in and out of matter all of the time.

An absorbed photon is as said: never re-created. Totally new radiation is produced at emission.

Hi Nick, bluehigh, 3nexxio6 et al,

The conversion process from light to a fermionic state and then back again is possible theoretically since qubits can be transferred to other particles from light and then back to light in laboratory experiments already. It seems to me this qubit operation completely reconstitute the original photons if the qubit is returned to the "reconstituted" photons from their fermionic "intermediate" particle state ... transferred intact back to the "original" photon packet regardless of that intermediate state. The only difference being that instead of transferring the qubit from one photon to another photon it is simply transferred back to the "original photon" through the "magic" of "slow light". Now does this early experiment do this? I can't say but refinements may indeed produce this effect. Is the photon the same as the one that went in? As far as science knows it must be if the two/three states are "entangled". Maybe even chickens can travel like this too... he he he! It is simply a new form of "slow" quantum teleportation.

Plain English Version... Light beam carrying information goes in one side, gets converted to a pseudo-particle stream and travels slowly across a space and then converted back to light... and the original information encoded on that beam will be possible to be decoded off it at the other side. This is duplicating previous work by Zellinger with a "twist".

Cheers

This post has been edited by Good Elf on Feb 9 2007, 11:09 AM

Hi Nick, bluehigh, 3nexxio6 et al,

Here are some cross references based on the original story found here at Physorg...
Exchange of light and matter: PhysOrg

Here is where the rest of the story has been originally coming from...
Light and matter united: Opens the way to new computers and communication systems: Harvard
Here is one place where it appears in the Media...
Physicists stop light, then restart it: ABC


Picture of Lene Hau and the story of how her "holographic process" works above.

I think the Harvard story suggests very strongly that they have been able to retain the original qubit. This means a total reconstruction of the original light with its full load of information.

Cheers

This is cool science

WOW! First light to matter then returned to light, one day matter turned to light and then returned to matter. WOW! Beam me up Scotty!

This is definitely amazing stuff.

A couple of questions come to mind.

How to cleanly separate the two different BEC clouds? There can't be vacuum in between, must be non-condensate instead. The 'light' must travel at speed of sound during this point.

The other thing is why slow down light at all for communication? Since it is really the speed of light that makes it attractive.

Physics Web described some more detail: http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/2/7/1

It seems there is transfer of atoms from one BEC cloud to the other.

Einstein General relativity fails, therefore.

William J. Cromie doesn't know what he's talking about.

When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled.

Entangled Particle Holographics will be the name given to this hallmark discovery by Michael E. Thomas in which the event history of optical entangled ferroelectric molecules is continuously emitted (broadcast) non-locally and is received by and interacts with the other entangled particle pair's matter in its environment through a subtle process of exchange of quantum information. This is an extension of the known process of quantum emission/absorption and analogous to non-local quantum entanglement of the ferroelectric particle pairs matter.

Entangled Particle Holographics extends the reach of quantum physics beyond the atom and subatomic particles, not only deeper into the optical media data quantum substrate, but also into the larger world of encrypted data transmission. It brings the role of information in physical theories to the same level of importance as energy itself. Entangled Particle Holographics focuses not so much on ferroelectric particles as on the relationships and dynamic exchanges between energy, matter, photons, electric fields, and information. Entangled Particle Holographics looks into four basic quantum processes, heretofore largely ignored and left unexplored by science.

Look at the equation: E=MC2. 1kg of matter = 9x10^16 joules or enough to power every car in America for a week. If you could convert a photon to matter, you are going to have about a superstring's worth. bluehigh had the right idea. They merely stored a pattern in a BEC as patterns are what BEC's are all about.