Mix Like Olive Oil and Physics

In a weird turn of events, physicists used olive oil and photos to observe hysteresis. Hysteresis is a bit difficult to explain outright. To be clear, this is completely different from the physiological phenomenon of hysterics; this is purely an odd thing based in physics that happens in a variety of natural systems.

Let's take a magnet, for example. Magnets have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field depending on how the field changed in the past. In other words, plots of a single component of the movement of said magnet will form a loop also known as a hysteresis curve. Essentially, all of the different values of one variable depending on the direction of the change of another variable - essentially patterns/movement based on history dependence. Another example: think about when your computer lags. You move your mouse and it takes a second or two for the screen to respond? That’s probably the most relatable manifestation of hysteresis. There is only a finite space in which the mouse will move, and while you don't see it move in real time, you know exactly where it's going because the path in which it will move has been plotted.

Hysteresis occurs in ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials as well as in shape-memory alloys to name some of the phenomena you can observe it in. Hysteresis is something that commonly occurs in the natural world and can be found in areas beyond physics, such as chemistry, biology, engineering, and even economics.

Another area where hysteresistic systems are studied in boiling water as well. What does this have to do with olive oil? The Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) used a drop of olive oil to create a mirror effect within a system of iterating photons and the results generated a reaction that mimics memory. In order to conduct their research on hysteresis in photons, the researchers positioned two mirrors such that the photons would bounce between them, and then added a drop of oil so that the behavior of the photons could be measured. The oil acts as a laser cavity so that the photons could be observed inside of it. By scanning the laser-cavity and detuning it at different speeds they found a hysteresis area that was a function of the speed of the photon.

Despite what is known about hysteresis, there is still some debate about what causes it to happen. Either way, with this new study, the researchers can now focus on potential applications of hysteresis instead of what causes hysteresis and other instances of it occurring.

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