WOO HOO! Just read about an article about photon-trapping in natural science website. =D One of them is trapping the photons in nano-soup while the other is trapping photon in a ultrareflective material.
Come to think about it, is there really anything in this world that will not absorb photon? I believe there is not. Why? It is because the photon absorption is due to the angular momentum transfer between the photon and the atomic particles (I believe that is the case as I am not an expert in quantum mechanics). Therefore, the possible absorption will be governed by the energy levels in a system. When a system is on macroscopic scale, their molecular orbitals will be interacting in a massive scale, meaning that the system energy levels will be in bands instead of levels. This is the consequence of losing quantum properties as the number of particle is high.
However, it crossed my mind once on how to 'complex' with photon. Since photon has an angular momentum which is the same as other atomic particle, just that it is very weak. Is it possible to create a molecular cage that can 'trap' photons? It will be nice if one could add the decomposing agent to destroy this molecular cage and let the photons escaped to its 'death'*.
As we all know, molecules are governed by quantized energy levels starting from rotational energy levels, vibrational energy levels, electronic energy levels, nucleus energy levels (I am not sure whether translational motion is quantized as well or not). Thus, I am quite sure that there will be at least more than 1 type of photons with a certain energy that will not be absorbed by this molecule as the energy levels difference is quantized.
This idea is inspired from the one of the species of the Birch reduction, the solvated electrons. Electrons can be solvated by ammonia molecules, causing it to be a very reactive reducing agent. If electrons can be trapped, can photon also be trapped by such method?
It will be interesting to find out more about it.
ZOMG, I seriously shall stop this and revise my analytical chemistry. I just woke up, btw. Good morning, world!
peace
vixklen
*photon is said to be dead when it 'reacted' with something, such as our retina or absorbed by some material. Scientists are trying to trap photon to let it maintain its energy and not transferring the energy to somewhere else. We could say it is a 'very small' energy trap.
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