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Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter Photons with strong mutual attraction in a quantum nonlinear medium. Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it. Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25...

Artist’s impression of the quantum photonic chip, showing the waveguide circuit (in white), and the voltage-controlled phase shifters (metal contacts on the surface). Photon pairs become entangled as they pass through the circuit. The fundamental resource that drives a quantum computer is entanglement—the connection between two distant particles which Einstein famously called 'spooky action at a distance'. The Bristol researchers have, for the first time, shown that this remarkable phenomenon can be generated, manipulated and measured entirely on a tiny silica chip. They have also used the same chip to measure mixture—an often unwanted effect from the environment, but...

March 15, 2007 Physicists at the University of Bath will soon begin a research project which could be an important step towards the development of photonic computers – devices run using light rather than electronics – onto the desktop. The project involves research into attosecond technology – the ability to send out light in a continuous series of pulses that last only an attosecond, one billion-billionth of a second. The research could not only develop the important technology of photonics, but could give physicists that chance to look at the world of atomic structure very closely for the first time.