Star Wars Fans are having the best week ever.

 
Scientists at MIT and Harvard University have created a new kind of matter. But does anyone care about that? Not really; all the buzz on the web this week has been on what this new matter looks like – a real life lightsaber.

 
The discovery was by no means intentional, despite the millions of Star Wars fans that have long dreamed of such a phenomenon. These scientists were aiming at a larger (at least from a scientific standpoint) goal – developing photons to be used in a quantum supercomputer. Let’s see if we can break down the experiment into laymen’s terms.

 
Photons, the elementary particles of light, are massless and as a general rule do not interact with one another. Before now, in fact, it was only theoretically possible to get one photon to acknowledge another. However, when the Harvard-MIT team used a laser to blast these photons through a cloud of cooled rubidium atoms, something interesting started to happen. Sending more than one photon through at a time caused the photons to clump together, pushing or pulling one another, a result caused by a principle called the Rydberg blockade. This Rydberg blockade states that an excited photon cannot excite nearby atoms; therefore, while in the cooled atom cloud, the photons were forced to work together to help each other through. Got that? I know, I’m still wrapping my head around it as well. Harvard professor of physics Mikhail Lukin does a little better job of explaining this amazing phenomenon.

 
“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 the bind together to form molecules” explains Lukin. “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” – which creates the oh-so-cool lightsaber effect.

 
While Lukin has been quoted as saying “it’s not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers”, I wouldn’t count on fighting the Sith lords of your childhood fantasy any time soon. The scientists’ focus remains on using the newly discovered state of matter for the advancement of quantum computing (the audacity!). For Star Wars enthusiasts the world over, the knowledge that the technology now exists will have to suffice for the time being. So until scientists redirect their attention to the real discovery that was made here, I guess we’ll all have to continue to make due with whatever super toy Wicked Lasers puts out next.