A team of scientists including theoretical physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, have discovered that a molecule with its own force can be formed from weightless light particles. This discovery has taken the researchers one step closer toward building objects from light.
The research on using photons for building object has been built on the previous research conducted by the NIST collaborators from Harvard, Caltech and MIT. They managed to find a way of binding two photons together in a way to make one sit on top of the other, superimposed during their traveling.
This has been considered a major break-through, as nothing similar has been done so far, and people's imagination jumped straight into constructing a real-life lightsaber.
Although this time is yet to come, the paper to be published in the Physical Review Letters by the end of September 2015, has proved the theory behind the construction. It appears that by modifying a few parameters of the binding process, photons could be made to travel side by side, in analogy to the way the two hydrogen atoms are situated next to each other in a hydrogen molecule, although the construction is not a real molecule.