In a World-First, Scientists Have Achieved ‘Liquid Light’ at Room Temperature

For the first time, physicists have achieved ‘liquid light’ at room temperature, making this strange form of matter more accessible than ever.

This matter is both a superfluid, which has zero friction and viscosity, and a kind of Bose-Einstein condensate – sometimes described as the fifth state of matter – and it allows light to actually flow around objects and corners.

Regular light behaves like a wave, and sometimes like a particle, always travelling in a straight line. That’s why your eyes can’t see around corners or objects. But under extreme conditions, light can also act like a liquid, and actually flow around objects.

Bose-Einstein condensates are interesting to physicists because in this state, the rules switch from classical to quantum physics, and matter starts to take on more wave-like properties.

They are formed at temperatures close to absolute zero and exist for only fractions of a second.

But in this study, researchers report making a Bose-Einstein condensate at room temperature by using a Frankenstein mash-up of light and matter.

“The extraordinary observation in our work is that we have demonstrated that superfluidity can also occur at room-temperature, under ambient conditions, using light-matter particles called polaritons,” says lead researcher Daniele Sanvitto, from the CNR NANOTEC Institute of Nanotechnology in Italy.

Creating polaritons involved some serious equipment and nanoscale engineering.…..More Here

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