A laser device that produces particles with negative mass. Free Technical Library News

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Laser device that produces particles with negative mass

13.01.2018

In our physical world, if you push any object, it, according to Newton's Second Law, begins to move away from you. But objects with negative mass will act contrary to this principle, the more you push them, the faster they will move in your direction. All this seems like an impossible thing, nevertheless, such an effect has long been theoretically substantiated and its manifestations were observed in some experiments. And recently, researchers at the University of Rochester completed the development of a device capable of producing particles with negative mass.

In experiments conducted by scientists at the University of Washington last year, a "fluid" consisting of a Bose-Einstein condensate, a cloud of rubidium atoms cooled to an ultra-low temperature by laser light, showed negative mass. In the device created by the Rochester researchers, the negative mass effect is exhibited by quasi-particles produced by fusing photons of laser light with excitons produced in a semiconductor material.

The design of the new device is in many ways similar to that of a conventional laser. Light is directed into the gap between a pair of parallel mirrors. The space enclosed between these two mirrors is called an optical trap, and at the center of this optical trap was placed an atomically thin layer of a semiconductor material, molybdenite, molybdenum disulfide, which interacts with the light trapped inside the optical trap. Excitons produced in a semiconductor combine with photons of light to form quasi-particles called polaritons, which exhibit the negative mass effect.

"By forcing an exciton to give up some of its 'identity' to a photon of light, we get negative-mass polaritons," says Nick Vamivakas, lead researcher. If the "negative" polariton is pulled or pushed, it will begin to move in the opposite direction to that which intuition tells the person."

Scientists from Rochester still continue to work, exploring the physics and behavior of particles with negative mass produced by the device they created. The field of practical application of this achievement has not yet been determined, but scientists are confident that the use of "negative" polaritons will make it possible to create more powerful and efficient lasers.

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