Einstein famously stated he wanted to trap a photon in a box for around a second, and now a team of French scientists has managed to go one step further by maintaining a constant number of photons in a high-quality microwave cavity in a permanent manner, as they outline in a new study published in the journal Nature. The study was led by scientists from the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel in Paris.
Building on a breakthrough they made four years ago, where they observed a single and same microwave photon trapped in a box hundreds of times over, in this new study the team stabilised a given number of photons in a 'photon box', a cavity formed of two superconducting mirrors. It is the first time a complete experiment of quantum stabilisation has occurred.
Usually the photon, the basic unit of light, can only be observed when it disappears. The eye absorbs photons, destroying them and translating the information they carry as it is recorded. link
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