Lame Villain Ahead of His Time

 In: Rave > 2018
 Posted: Feb 2018
 Staff: Dave Sippel (E-Mail)

Comics aren't known as being scientifically accurate. Superpowers are a little unbelievable and the power of transformation has always been the most unlikely. In fact, I've heard people say that Homecoming was the best of the recent Spidey films because the Vulture's power is semi plausible compared to Sandman, Venom, the Lizard, and Electro. Lightmaster is another criminal with doubtful abilities, such as changing light into a solid form and making weapons from it. Edward Lansky was the Vice Chancellor at ESU and a professor of light phenomenon. He kidnapped other ESU staff that he believed were harming the university and planned to kill them. Spidey got in the way and Lansky would attack him with solidified light weapons in the forms of axes and hammers.

Lightmaster eventually became a being of light, but he initially seemed to have a device that caused the transformation from energy to solid. At least that is what Spider-Man says in an offhand comment while fighting him. It's not very clear. Lansky may have had some kind of "superconducting wires" and an "artificial atom." Not bad for one of Spidey's more obscure foes.

Lansky's outlandish comic book experiment has come (kind of) true. This was reported by IFL Science.

On a late summer afternoon it can seem like sunlight has turned to honey, but could liquid—or even solid—light be more than a piece of poetry? Princeton University electrical engineers say not only is it possible, they’ve already made it happen.

In Physical Review X, the researchers reveal that they have locked individual photons together so that they become like a solid object.

"It's something that we have never seen before," says Dr. Andrew Houck, an associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the researchers. "This is a new behavior for light."

The researchers constructed what they call an “artificial atom” made of 100 billion atoms engineered to act like a single unit. They then brought this close to a superconducting wire carrying photons. In one of the almost incomprehensible behaviors unique to the quantum world, the atom and the photons became entangled so that properties passed between the “atom” and the photons in the wire. The photons started to behave like atoms, correlating with each other to produce a single oscillating system.

As some of the photons leaked into the surrounding environment, the oscillations slowed and at a critical point started producing quantum divergent behavior. In other words, like Schroedinger's Cat, the correlated photons could be in two states at once.

"Here we set up a situation where light effectively behaves like a particle in the sense that two photons can interact very strongly," said co-author Dr. Darius Sadri. "In one mode of operation, light sloshes back and forth like a liquid; in the other, it freezes."

As cool as it is to produce solidified light, the team was not acting out of curiosity alone. When connected together the photons of light behave like subatomic particles, but are in some ways easier to study. Consequently, the team is hoping to use the solid light to simulate subatomic behavior.

Attempts to model the behavior of large numbers of particles usually use statistical mechanics, and often simplify by assuming no interaction between particles and a system at equilibrium. However, in a point we can all relate to, Houck and his colleagues note, “The world around us is rarely in equilibrium.” The solidified light offers a chance to observe a subatomic system as it starts to diverge from equilibrium, with potential for a basic understanding of how these systems operate.

The system created so far is very simple, with the light entangled with the atom at two points. However, it should be possible to increase this, greatly expanding the complexity and range of possibilities of what is being constructed.

As well as providing an easy-to-study model of atomic systems that actually exist, Houck and his team hope the frozen light could be made to behave like materials that do not exist, but have been hypothesised by physicists, allowing them to explore how these things would react if they were real.

Scientists Create Solid Light at IFL Science.

 In: Rave > 2018
 Posted: Feb 2018
 Staff: Dave Sippel (E-Mail)