---
title: "Halting Photons Could Lead To Miniature Particle Accelerators"
description: "Researchers at MIT who succeeded last year in creating a material that could trap light and stop it in its tracks have now developed a more fundamental understanding of the process"
date: "2014-12-23"
modified: "2014-12-23"
authors:
  - name: "StefanCretu"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/stefancretu"
url: "https://futurism.com/halting-photons-lead-miniature-particle-accelerators"
categories:
  - "Future Society"
---

# Halting Photons Could Lead To Miniature Particle Accelerators

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/haltingphoto.jpg>)

- The findings are reported in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, co-authored by MIT physics professor Marin Soljačić; postdocs Bo Zhen, Chia Wei Hsu, and Ling Lu; and Douglas Stone, a professor of applied physics at Yale University
- Light can usually be confined only with mirrors, or with specialized materials such as photonic crystals. Both of these approaches block light beams; last year's finding demonstrated a new method in which the waves cancel out their own radiation fields
- The new work shows that this light-trapping process, which involves twisting the polarization direction of the light, is based on a kind of vortex—the same phenomenon behind everything from tornadoes to water swirling down a drain