This unique mixture – or "strong coupling" – of light and matter, achieved for the first time at room temperature, will help scientists develop better on-chip communications, manipulate quantum information, or even tweak the chemical bonds of single molecules.

When we manipulate matter to produce light – be it by rubbing sticks to light a fire, heating a tungsten filament, or combining electric charges – photons normally leave their point of origin at the speed of light, never to return. But if those photons are somehow trapped and forced to interact with matter over and over (as was done in this study), light and matter can achieve "strong coupling," a unique hybrid state where a photon and a molecule are in a continuous interchange.

"It is a very strange interchange, indeed, because if you would compare the molecule and the light to a system such as tea and milk you would see the tea and the milk mixing when you pour the milk into the cup, but no-one would really expect that tea and milk would in time continuously de-mix and mix again," Prof. Ortwin Hess, the study's lead author, told Gizmag. "In the strongly coupled state, however, this happens to light and the molecule."