(Worthy Insights) – In a first in the history of physics, scientists have turned light into a supersolid.
“A supersolid is a counter-intuitive phase of matter in which its constituent particles are arranged into a crystalline structure, yet they are free to flow without friction,” the abstract for the study in Nature revealed.
“We actually made light into a solid. That’s pretty awesome,” Dimitris Trypogeorgos, from the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, enthused. Along with his colleagues, he took a different route from prior research, which created supersolids in experiments using extremely cold atoms. Instead, they used the semiconductor aluminium gallium arsenide and a laser, as New Scientist reported, adding that the connections between the light and the material created a “polariton,” which formed the supersolid. [ Source (Read More…) ]