We’re a step closer to making real-life lightsabers

Scientists have brought lightsabers one step closer to reality, by creating a new type of “interactive” light.

Normally, light beams simply pass through each other, but researchers have found a way to get photons – which emit light – to interact with each other.

It sounds complicated, but it’s actually a simple concept.

First, imagine taking two flashlights into a dark room, and then shining them so that their beams cross each other.

You’d notice that absolutely nothing happens. The photons that make up the light beams pass each other by, rather than interacting.

That’s a big reason why the lightsabers from “Star Wars,” seem so impossible because scientists have struggled to find a way to make light interact with other light.

Now, scientists at MIT and Harvard University have demonstrated that photons can be made to interact, which could pave the way for advancements in quantum computing – and potentially lightsabers, one day.

The findings, which were published in the journal Science, showed how, in certain circumstances, photons can be bound together.

Researchers shined a very weak laser through a dense cloud of ultra-cold rubidium atoms and made a startling discovery.

Instead of the photons exiting the cloud as single, randomly spaced photons, they joined together as pairs or triplets.

Photons typically have no mass whatsoever and can move at the speed of light.

But researchers found that photons that bound together acquired a fraction of an electron’s mass.

This meant that they suddenly became more sluggish, and traveled around 100,000 times slower than a normal photon.

MIT’s Professor Vladan Vuletic, who led the team, described how the findings are a major breakthrough.

“The interaction of individual photons has been a very long dream for decades,” Vuletic explained.

He also added that the photons of light remained bound together even after leaving the cloud, saying that they “remember” when they get out.

Demonstrating that photons can attract each other means that they could be made to interact in other ways.

For instance, scientists believe they could be used to perform fast, complicated quantum computations.

And in a distant future, we could see combined photons used to create interactive beams of light that work in a similar fashion to “Star Wars” lightsabers.