A magic mirror

Our reflected image in a mirror resembles us: we have the same physical size and appearance and our clothing and skin have the same color. What would you say if a mirror returned two images, and one was a blue-shifted version?

Vitor Cardoso and Zhen Zhong, from the Niels Bohr Institute and Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, together with Rodrigo Vicente, from the Institute for High Energy Physics of Barcelona, have shown precisely that. Their mirror is any object made of fundamental massive fields, for example a coherent collection of Higgs fields. A plethora of such objects are conjectured to exist and be part (or the whole) of dark matter. This result, in a work recently published in Physical Review Letters, shows that there can be energy transfer from the mirror to the image as well, a mechanism that could revolutionize our understanding of the stability of time-periodic fundamental soliton.

While the implications of this breakthrough are yet to be fully realized, it is clear that the discovery has far-reaching effects that could significantly impact multiple fields, including particle physics, gravity, and astrophysics. This finding open up a new line of inquiry and represent a significant leap forward in our understanding of the fundamental processes that govern the universe.