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The Photon Push-Me Pull-You Update

Published by swansont on January 9, 2009 04:53 am under Cool stuff, Experiments, Physics, Video

Back in June I wrote up a post an the Abraham-Minkowski controversy, which concerns the momentum of a photon when it’s in a medium.

Depending on the assumptions one makes, one can show that the momentum increases or decreases inside the medium, and obviously both solutions can’t be correct. But for a long time it was unclear which assumptions were faulty, because it was such a delicate experiment to do.

I just ran across a post at Everyday Scientist, and the paper (based on the ArXiv preprint I cite in the link) was published last month … and there’s a video.

Light Bends Glass

The researchers performed a second experiment with a longer fiber and continuous–rather than pulsed–laser light and found similar results. The tip of the hanging fiber moved sideways like a pendulum by about 30 microns, which agreed with the tiny force (less than a billionth of a Newton) that they predicted. The team also verified that thermal effects, such as heat expansion, would be too small to influence the fiber’s movement.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

No Comment

  1. gg on January 9th, 2009

    Aargh! I was going to post on this subject later today! I’ve been scooped!

  2. swansont on January 9th, 2009

    Being scooped only occasionally stops me from posting. 🙂

  3. gg on January 9th, 2009

    Yeah, I’ll probably still post something later, if for no other reason than it will force me to finish reading the material I downloaded about the A-M controversy!

Posting your comment.

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