An international research team from Germany and France has created structures in which light fields interact with electrons so strongly that the quantum vacuum itself is significantly altered. Using extremely short bursts of light, they interrupted this coupling much faster than the timescale of a vacuum fluctuation and observed an intriguing ringing of the emitted electromagnetic field, indicating the collapse of the vacuum state. Their key achievement could improve our understanding of the nature of nothingness—the vacuum of space itself, paving a way toward photonics exploiting vacuum fluctuations. The results are published in the current issue of Nature Photonics.
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Source: Phys.org