MIT and Harvard scientists have found a molecule that acts just like a weapon made by Luke Skywalker in the movie Star Wars.
"It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers," Harvard physics professor Mikhail Lukin said in a statement according to CBS News. "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."
A team of scientists at both universities published information about the findings in Wednesday's edition of the Journal Nature. The find is the closest any has ever gotten to creating a real-life lightsaber, which requires one to understand the physics of the object.
"Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless and do not interact," Lukin said. "What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass, and bind together to form molecules."
Researchers were in the process of the making photons for a quantum supercomputer when they made the discovery about the lightsaber. They used a laser to rapidly sent the photons through a cloud of rubidium atoms. They then put multiple photons through the atoms at a time, which resulted in the photons to stick together through a principle called, the Rydberg blockade or when an "excited photon cannot excite nearby atoms.
There was no information that scientists would use the find to make lightsabers in real life.
When the researchers sent more than one photon through at a time, the principle of the rydberg blockade caused the photons to clump together. The rydberg blockade states that an excited photon cannot excite nearby atoms. In the cloud, the photons were forced to help each other through.
The report gives no indication that the scientists will be using the discovery to create real-life lightsabers.
According to CBS News, Disney has gone to work on new trilogy of "Star Wars" films. This is scheduled to come out in 2015, 2017, and 2109, which creates the possibility of fans being able to obtain them as souvenirs.
