These and other applications can be improved by increasing how strongly infrared light interacts with atomic vibrations in materials. This, in turn, can be accomplished by trapping the light into a small volume that contains the materials. Trapping light can be as simple as making it reflect back and forth between a pair of mirrors, but much stronger interactions can be realized if nanometer-scale metallic structures, or "nanocavities," are used to confine the light on ultra-small length scales.
When this happens, the interactions can be strong enough that the quantum-mechanical nature of the light and the vibrations comes into play. Under such conditions, the absorbed energy is transferred back and forth between the light (photons) in the computer science average salary and the atomic vibrations (phonons) in the material at a rate fast enough such that the light photon and matter phonon can no longer be distinguished. Under such conditions, these strongly coupled modes result in new quantum-mechanical objects that are part light and part vibration at the same time, known as "polaritons."
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