Maybe lightsabers will finally become a real thingFor anyone that has seen Star Wars, you know that not much of what the franchise incorporates into the movies has any actual realism. One of the most iconic things to come from Star Wars is lightsabers, but even those aren't really possible because photons do not interact with each other, which is needed for a lightsaber.Research published recently in Science shows that it is possible for photons to in fact interact with each other. They were even able to get three photons to bind together. Although the new found technology isn't strong enough to defeat the dark side yet, it is a solid step towards creating photon-based quantum computers.The two lead researchers for the project are MIT physicist Vladen Vuletic and Harvard physicist Mikhail Lukin, who together head up the joint MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. They have spent the last few years trying to get photons to interact with each other, with their first major succe...
