FYI:
Article being referenced is at the bottom, however, I wanted to toss something out to The Collective first… One of the things that caught my eye in the article is the ‘room temperature’ condition… As we all know, atoms at room temp are vibrating like crazy since they contain the equivalent of 273degC of energy above their lowest state. Thus, ‘coherent’ states in condensed matter above absolute zero is almost never seen. The article’s experiment was done in material at room temp, so the observed behavior is a bit of a surprise. Perhaps what they have not yet thought about is that the ‘microcavities’ have no temperature, as I will explain below. This ties in with a point I tried to explain to Dr. Storms, and although I think he realizes my point had merit, he glossed right over it and went off on a different tangent. This was in a vortex discussion about 9 to 12 months ago. The point is this: The ‘temperature’ inside a ‘void’ in a crystal lattice is most likely that of the vacuum of space; i.e, absolute zero, or very close to it. Because, temperature is nothing more than excess energy imparted to atoms from neighboring atoms; atoms have temperature; space/vacuum does not. Without atoms (physical matter), you have no temperature. In a lattice void, if it is large enough (whatever that dimension is), there is NO ‘temperature’ inside since the void contains no atoms. If an atom diffuses into that void, it enters with whatever energy it had when it entered, so it has a temperature. At this time, I have not heard any discussion as to whether the atoms which make up the walls of the void shed IR photons which could get absorbed by an atom in the void and increase its temperature, however, would that atom want to immediately shed that photon to get back to its lowest energy level??? So voids in crystals likely provide an ideal environment for the formation of BECs. -mark iverson ARTICLE BEING REFERENCED Strong light–matter coupling in two-dimensional atomic crystals http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v9/n1/full/nphoton.2014.304.html Abstract “Two-dimensional atomic crystals of graphene, as well as transition-metal dichalcogenides, have emerged as a class of materials that demonstrate strong interaction with light. This interaction can be further controlled by embedding such materials into optical microcavities. When the interaction rate is engineered to be faster than dissipation from the light and matter entities, one reaches the ‘strong coupling’ regime. This results in the formation of half-light, half-matter bosonic quasiparticles called microcavity polaritons. Here, we report evidence of strong light–matter coupling and the formation of microcavity polaritons in a two-dimensional atomic crystal of molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) embedded inside a dielectric microcavity at room temperature. A Rabi splitting of 46 ± 3 meV is observed in angle-resolved reflectivity and photoluminescence spectra due to coupling between the two-dimensional excitons and the cavity photons. Realizing strong coupling at room temperature in two-dimensional materials that offer a disorder-free potential landscape provides an attractive route for the development of practical polaritonic devices.”
