{"id":19433,"date":"2018-02-23T16:54:24","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T16:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ch.imperial.ac.uk\/rzepa\/blog\/?p=19433"},"modified":"2018-02-23T16:54:24","modified_gmt":"2018-02-23T16:54:24","slug":"is-h%ce%bd3-an-allotrope-of-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/?p=19433","title":{"rendered":"Is  (h\u03bd)3 an allotrope of light?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"kcite-section\" kcite-section-id=\"19433\">\n<p>A little while ago I pondered <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ch.imperial.ac.uk\/rzepa\/blog\/?p=13987\">allotropic bromine<\/a>, or Br(Br)<sub>3<\/sub>. But this is a far wackier report<span id=\"cite_ITEM-19433-0\" name=\"citation\"><a href=\"#ITEM-19433-0\">[1]<\/a><\/span> of <i>a molecule of light.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The preparation and detection of dimer and trimer bound photon states is pure physics; probably considered by the physicists themselves as NOT chemistry. It is certainly true, as a chemist, \u00a0that I understood only a little of the article. But chemistry uses photons extensively in the area we call photochemistry. We represent photons as\u00a0h\u03bd, and hence (h\u03bd)<sub>3<\/sub>.<\/p>\n<p>This molecular light has some fascinating properties. One is that it travels around 100,000 times slower than the usual speed of light. Another is the estimate of the photon-photon binding energies, which are ~10<sup>10<\/sup> times smaller than in diatomic\u00a0molecules such as NaCl and H<sub>2<\/sub>. I await with interest to see whether this new state of light will achieve any interesting chemistry.<\/p>\n<h2>References<\/h2>\n    <ol class=\"kcite-bibliography csl-bib-body\"><li id=\"ITEM-19433-0\">Q. Liang, A.V. Venkatramani, S.H. Cantu, T.L. Nicholson, M.J. Gullans, A.V. Gorshkov, J.D. Thompson, C. Chin, M.D. Lukin, and V. Vuleti\u0107, \"Observation of three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium\", <i>Science<\/i>, vol. 359, pp. 783-786, 2018. <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.aao7293\">https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.aao7293<\/a>\n\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n<\/div> <!-- kcite-section 19433 -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A little while ago I pondered allotropic bromine, or Br(Br)3. But this is a far wackier report of a molecule of light. The preparation and detection of dimer and trimer bound photon states is pure physics; probably considered by the physicists themselves as NOT chemistry. It is certainly true, as a chemist, \u00a0that I understood [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[2341,1406,2344,94,1416,2034,1460,1493],"class_list":["post-19433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting-chemistry","tag-atomic-physics","tag-bromine","tag-bromine-compounds","tag-chemist","tag-chemistry","tag-halogens","tag-hypobromite","tag-oxidizing-agents"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPyz-53r","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}