Can Light Really Have Mass According to Harvard-MIT Research?

[_Gandalf_]

I was searching about the light and I found an article tha says that the light could have some kind of mass. This research was made at Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic and I don't know

 

[pabilbado]

I don't know what you really mean, if you are talking about momentun certainly light has momentun.

 

[jtbell]

Can you give us a link to the article?

 

[bahamagreen]

Wiki says "Photons inside superconductors do develop a nonzero effective rest mass; as a result, electromagnetic forces become short-range inside superconductors."

 

[anorlunda]

I Googled the phrase and I found http://phys.org/news/2013-09-scientists-never-before-seen.html#jCp

The summary does not use the word mass, but it says :

Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25 paper in Nature.​

 

[Sedleyj]

Light does not have intrinsic or rest mass. It has an equivalent mass due to its energy.

 

[DrDu]

Light in vacuo does not have mass. However, photon-like quasi-particles in matter can well have a non-zero effective mass.

 

[_Gandalf_]

Can you give us a link to the article?

http://phys.org/news/2013-09-scientists-never-before-seen.html here it is

 

[Nugatory]

http://phys.org/news/2013-09-scientists-never-before-seen.html here it is

The actual paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7469/full/nature12512.html

A comparison of the abstract with the phys.org piece will encourage you to approach the latter with some skepticism in the future. It's a neat and fascinating piece of work, but interpreting it as "light can have mass" is a big stretch.

 

[_Gandalf_]

The actual paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7469/full/nature12512.html

A comparison of the abstract with the phys.org piece will encourage you to approach the latter with some skepticism in the future. It's a neat and fascinating piece of work, but interpreting it as "light can have mass" is a big stretch.

Ok, thnak you very much