Kabyik Kayal

Italian Scientists Successfully "Freeze" Light, Creating a New State of Matter Fascinating news from the world of quantum physics! Italian scientists have recently achieved something remarkable – they've successfully "frozen" pure light, demonstrating that light can behave as a supersolid. This breakthrough research was published in Nature Magazine on March 5, 2025, and represents a significant leap in our understanding of fundamental physics. What is a Supersolid? A supersolid exists in a fascinating quantum state where matter simultaneously displays properties of both solids and liquids. It maintains a crystalline structure like a solid while flowing without friction like a superfluid. Until this breakthrough, supersolids had only been observed in Bose-Einstein condensates – specialized gases cooled to temperatures approaching absolute zero. Physicists Antonio Gianfate (CNR Nanotec) and Davide Nigro (University of Pavia) demonstrated that light can exhibit supersolid properties. Using a photonic semiconductor platform, they created conditions where photons behaved collectively in ways previously thought impossible. When specific quantum conditions were achieved, the photons formed "satellite condensates" with unique energy properties, causing a spatial modulation in photon density characteristic of the supersolid state. This marks the first time a supersolid has been created without using ultracold atoms. This discovery fundamentally challenges our conventional understanding of light and matter. Light has always been thought of as the fastest phenomenon in the universe – something that never truly stops. Previous experiments had managed to slow or briefly halt light: In 2003, Harvard researchers stopped light for milliseconds In 2013, physicists at TU Darmstadt extended this to about one minute However, this new research demonstrates an entirely different phenomenon – light exhibiting properties of a crystalline solid while maintaining quantum flow properties. The researchers themselves note, "This is only the beginning of understanding supersolidity"  The applications could be transformative: - Advanced quantum computing systems that process information using light rather than electrons – potentially 10x faster than current technology - Revolutionary optical communications capable of storing and manipulating information in entirely new ways - New methods for studying other exotic states of matter As quantum physics continues to reveal the extraordinary complexities of our universe, breakthroughs like this remind us that we're still only beginning to understand the fundamental nature of reality. What other "impossible" scientific achievements do you think we'll witness in the coming years? Share your thoughts below! #QuantumPhysics #ScientificBreakthrough #Physics #Innovation #Research #Science #LightPhysics #QuantumMechanics

I agreed to a certain when most of my seniors said "Foundation Students shouldn't be allowed at IIT Madras" Last week I visited IIT Madras to attend the Paradox 2025 I travelled with my parents for 28 hours in train to reach the campus And my parents were very happy, Not because it was "IIT" (They don't know what an IIT is) The sole reason of their happiness was, I am the first person in my family to even attend a College (Huge Luxury) I was also very excited to explore the campus, make new friends and meet all of those people with whom I have only chatted in Whatsapp. The feeling was like an Euphoria What I saw over the next few days honestly broke my heart Despite being in one of India’s most prestigious institutions, many students (mostly from Foundation Level) showed zero civic sense and manners: - Throwing trash all over—rooms, corridors, halls - Turning the Green Campus into Dustbin - Disturbing the animals (mostly Deer) - Shouting in demeaning way towards women during the Mr and Mrs Paradox event - Stealing and using Cycles of regular B.Tech students who were on a holiday And things didn't stop here, I was disgusted when I entered the ICSR building, a place that should reflect discipline and curiosity, looked like it had hosted a riot. Here is how I could put it: Herbalife had setup a stall for promoting their products and were also distributing free goodies, They asked students to form a queue and collect the goodies, but nobody listened, the students were pressing each other to reach the stall and no queue was maintained, Those who were trying to maintain the queue were pushed back, at one point the stall was about to collapse due to the sheer pressure from those stupid mentally ill students. I can't understand how these people post hundreds of pictures on social media calling themselves IITians with these kind of behaviours. Our Professors and Director had asked everyone to maintain the Sanctity of the place, but no one listened And again let me remind you, most of them were Foundation Level students Who were attending Paradox for the first time And I agreed with my seniors even though I myself am a Foundation student If we can't respect the space we’re invited to, If we can’t act with basic decency Then maybe, we don't deserve to be there IIT Madras BS in Data Science Programme IITM CODE - BS Alumni CODE IIT Madras Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

Amid the Shithousery made by Galgotias University The media isn't highlighting the actual growth in Indian AI Ecosystem At Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, three AI systems were introduced to the public, each trained on Indian languages, deployed on Indian infrastructure, and built by Indian teams. One from Sarvam AI, trained on sixteen trillion tokens, capable of real-time voice conversation in the languages that most of the country actually speaks. One from BharatGen, a consortium anchored at IIT Bombay, a seventeen-billion-parameter model designed for governance, healthcare, and classrooms that textbooks have not yet reached. And one from Gnani.ai, a voice system that can clone a human voice across twelve Indian languages using fewer than ten seconds of reference audio. The numbers are easy to cite. What they point to is harder to summarize. For a long time, the working assumption in AI was that the frontier belonged to whoever had the largest cluster. Sovereignty, in that framing, was a secondary concern, something a country attended to after it had secured access to the primary systems. That assumption is being quietly revised. Sarvam's co-founder put it plainly: sovereignty matters more in AI than building the biggest model. That is not a concession. It is a different set of priorities, and it produces different work. There is also the matter of language. The models demonstrated at the summit are not translations of English-language systems. They are trained from the ground up on the way people in this country actually communicate, in Bhojpuri and Tamil and Kannada and a dozen others, with the tonal irregularities and cultural context that a fine-tuned Western model tends to sand away. A voice assistant that a farmer in Bihar can speak to in his own dialect is not a smaller version of ChatGPT. It is a different object entirely. The IndiaAI Mission put Rs 10,371 crore toward this infrastructure. The Investment is not a guarantee of anything. But the direction it points toward, training sovereign systems on native data, hosting them within national borders, building for populations that have historically been afterthoughts in the global AI roadmap, is a direction worth watching carefully. The interesting question is what they make possible in the next three years. Find Kabyik Kayal on X : https://lnkd.in/gfECjPPx