Eller kanske mera korrekt ljussvärd. Välkända från Star Wars. Nu kanske verkligheten:
I en nyhet som skapade rubriker världen över i september förra året, meddelade forskare vid Harvard University och Massachusetts Institute of Technology att de hade uppfunnit en variant av ljussvärd. Nu var det inte helt sant. Vad de egentligen gjorde var att skapa en miljö där fotoner hålls ihop likt molekyler, vilket skapar en slags fast ljus.
Kanske ändå inte, men liknande. Eller så mer lika än vad vi egentligen kanske kan tänka oss:
The discovery, Lukin said, runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as massless particles which don’t interact with each other – shine two laser beams at each other, he said, and they simply pass through one another.
”Photonic molecules,” however, behave less like traditional lasers and more like something you might find in science fiction – the light saber.
”Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other,” Lukin said. ”What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules. This type of photonic bound state has been discussed theoretically for quite a while, but until now it hadn’t been observed.
”It’s not an in-apt analogy to compare this to light sabers,” Lukin added. ”When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”
Kul och kanske lite spännande. Kanske kan vi alla vifta med ljussvärd vad det lider. Eller kanske inte alla. Kanske bara militärer. Men å andra sidan, ljussvärd är väl knappast intressant när striden redan är avgjord på avstånd med hjälp av skjutvapen, elektronik och drönare.
Intressant?
Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om Ljussvärd, Fotoner, Mikhail Lukin, MIT, Harvard, Star Wars, Science Fiction