A gas made from light becomes easier to compress as you squash it

Alex Wilkins

The more you squash it, the easier it is to make a gas with particles of light. The property could be useful in making highly sensitive sensors.

It is possible to create a gas of photons by trapping them with lasers. Researchers say that a gas made this way doesn't have a uniform density, making it difficult to study properly.

A group of people at the University of Bonn, Germany, have created a photon gas by trapping between two mirrors.

They moved one of the mirrors to measure the compressibility of the photon gas.

The system is not filled with air, but it is filled with light. In this way, we can learn a lot.

The team found that the gas could be compressed with no resistance. The molecule that repels each other is the one that makes a normal gas harder to compress.

This doesn't happen with the photon gas, thanks to quantum mechanics, which allows the photons to act as both particles and waves.

This photon gas could be used to make highly sensitive sensors for measuring forces.

There is a journal reference called Science.

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