Use The Force, Lukin
Seriously - no Star Wars reference to the guy's surname in the title / subtitle / article?
Top boffins in the US say they have managed to make light behave in the same way as solid matter – and they've saved us the trouble by suggesting that this is pretty much the same as building a working Jedi light sabre. "It's not an inapt analogy to compare this to light sabers," boasts Harvard physics prof Mikhail Lukin, one …
"Read the link might be an idea?"
That's not really fair to say to someone when the article is behind a paywall, now is it? OK, so in this case an example did happen to be in the abstract, but still not everyone has a subscription to every journal. Of course, the authors could have gone open access, as we all should these days.
"I wonder how much support the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms receives from the US government."
If the research was US Government funded and not classified, it'd not be behind a pay wall. It would be openly available for all to read.
Forget what law that was that required that one.
For classified stuff, all bets are off, save that it wouldn't end up published for a generation or so.
In uni we worked out that the "Light" and the crystal were probably a laser which supplied the energy to create the plasma and keep it hot.
The trigger activates the magnetic bottle, releases enough matter to become plasma which is then excited by the laser, electrons are diverted to one end of the bottle and possibly allowed to escape, where they interact with the atmosphere (creating the hiss-crackle as the blade is extended). The energy and mass lost when the blade interacts with the environment is why the laser has to be kept on and the blade continues to crackle as it's used.
Might have been a sad git at uni. Probably still am.
I gave a lot of thought to this myself, but concluded there was no way a sabre effect could be achieved.
I have designed a force field, though. I think it would work. It just has a few minor practical issues, like requiring the entire output of a power station to generate a field big enough to block a corridoor, an a tendency to incinerate anything that touches it. But the theory would work: You could flip marbles at it and they would just bounce off.
One day I will find a way to build it. I think I could run a small-scale prototype off no more than twenty kilowatts or so.
Not to mention the fact that lightsabers are HOT. They're hot enough to cauterize the wounds they make instantly, to melt blast doors, and to scorch pretty much anything they cut through. For that matter they don't really 'cut' so much as instantly melt a microscopic path through whatever they're used on. That's how hot they are.
This light-matter stuff, on the other hand, sounds like it's cold. And by that I mean superconductor range temperatures. Which is pretty much the opposite of a lightsaber.
Mine's the one with the Star Wars Encyclopedia in one pocket and the empty address book in the other.
One way I figured to build an actual light sabre would use a laser that, when focused, would be powerful enough to heat air to plasma.
Then using a piezoelectric lens so that the focal point would be swept back and forth to generate the 'blade'.
It'd look like a light sabre, burn through stuff, and make the crackling and vroom sounds.
Unfortunately, sword fights wouldn't work, the 'blades' would pass through each other.
Two major drawbacks:
The handle would need to be hooked up to a rather unwieldy power source and cooling air supply. You'd look like you were dragging a vacuum cleaner around by the hose.
Air tends to produce some nasty to breath compounds at that temperature, you'd need to wear a respirator to use it!
The handle would need to be hooked up to a rather unwieldy power source and cooling air supply. You'd look like you were dragging a vacuum cleaner around by the hose.
Canonically the first lightsabers (a few thousand years before Exar Kun and something like ten or fifteen thousand years before the movies) had a bulky backpack power supply about the size of a vacuum cleaner and a fat power cable going to the handle, so you're on the right track.
*Yes, I truly am sad enough to know that much about the history of the Star Wars universe. As I've mentioned before I had way too much time on my hands when I was younger. This is just further proof of the fact.
"Personally I've always considered light sabres to be magnetically confined plasma."
Briefly considered that back in the 1980's. Then, I considered how magnetic fields don't maintain annular confinement beyond a magnetic coil.
Then, I considered multiple standing waves and a holographic reflector at the point...
Finally, I considered it a matter of, "To hell with that idiocy. A blaster puts out a greater volume of fire."
... yeah - wholly out of light that is strongly coupled to rubidium atoms. So not /only/ out of light, which is what is strongly implied by "wholly out of light".
I look forward to the Star Wars pre-pre-pre-prequels where proto-jedi whack each other over the head with clubs made out of ultracold-atom vacuum systems. :-)
The only way you get light to not travel at lightspeed is to make it interact with something. E.g. in water, visible light interacts with the water molecules, and it slows by about 30% (hence the refractive index of 1.5). To make light really slow, you have to get it to interact very strongly - in this case, using a specific frequency of light tuned to specific transitions in carefully managed rubidium atoms.
This "slow light" therefore, is a rather misleading name - it isn't just light - it's a strongly coupled light-matter system, which some would prefer to call a polariton.
I can therefore only assume the down votes were for the poor quality joke.