What the linked article fails to mention among all the fantasizing about light sabers is that this kind of interaction is only possible in matter. These "molecules made of light" can only exist when photons interact with atoms while the light travels in a very special medium.
In vacuum, photon-photon interactions do not allow for any kind of bound states like that.
Just to echo your point: This is an interesting proposal more because of the ability to use for photonic information applications (quantum gates and such) then for light-sabers.
Fair warning to those looking at the original paper: I have my PhD as an experimentalist in this field, and it took me a while to work through what they were proposing :)
Why do people think of lightsabers first? I think better control over light leads to true holograms, primarily. Frankly, if holograms and lightsabers both magically appeared tomorrow, I would lean towards holograms being more important.
Note that in the article linked above, no real matter is created, just configurations that "act" as matter.
However, from [1]:
> [...] scientists at Imperial College London (including a visiting physicist from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) think they’ve figured out how to turn energy directly into matter [...] Their article in Nature Photonics proposes that a new kind of collider be built, one that smashes photons instead of protons, as at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN where the Higgs boson was discovered last year.
Of course, this probably requires much more energy.
Depends on HW, but that likely takes less resources than most websites. For reference, an old CF website used to support 60k users and a few thousand page views a second on a dual 450 MHz (Pentium III Xeon 450) cpu's. A modern CPU could probably serve 10x that.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03859
What the linked article fails to mention among all the fantasizing about light sabers is that this kind of interaction is only possible in matter. These "molecules made of light" can only exist when photons interact with atoms while the light travels in a very special medium.
In vacuum, photon-photon interactions do not allow for any kind of bound states like that.