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Yeah, 'photons interacting' means nonlinear optics. That's not a new field, to put it mildly. MIT's PR people are not helping science (or the institute) gain cr

• superkuh 9y ago
  The bury the real interaction (mediated via the mass in atoms not photon-photon) but the paragraph is in there, >If another photon is simultaneously traveling through the cloud, it can also spend some time on a rubidium atom, forming a polariton — a hybrid that is part photon, part atom. Then two polaritons can interact with each other via their atomic component. At the edge of the cloud, the atoms remain where they are, while the photons exit, still bound together. The researchers found that this same phenomenon can occur with three photons, forming an even stronger bond than the interactions between two photons.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• crispycrafter 9y ago
  Yeah that's about it. The refractive index of ant material can be described by a real and complex component. The real component takes into account the opacity, permissivity etc. whereas the complex component is dependent on the electromagnetic properties of the medium, such as the polarisarisability, and in a sense the interaction with quantum effects. (Have a look at the Kramers-Krönig relations) Now the interesting part is the temperature at which the experiment was performed. I anticipate that the decreased temperature would impact the gas clouds electromagnetic field, meaning less polirisation. Perhaps the gasses electrons occupy a lower quantum state, allowing the photons to occupy the, now un-occupied valence shells, en hence the lensing effect. Remarkable, if I'm right that is