Scientists have just found a way to create a new form of light that could totally change the future of computing and communications. Researchers in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were able to link photons and create an entirley new light form that could be used to build light crystals with tremendous scientific applications.

Researchers did this by creating a cloud of chilled rubidium atoms, using lasors to vaporize and create an ultracold cloud that caused atoms to move slowly, but remain very excited. Then scientists used lasers to send photons into the cloud, which slowed down and exited the cloud as pairs or triplets.

The exciting discovery, which was detailed in the journal Science, could be used to create crystals that have major implications in communications and computing.

“The interaction of individual photons has been a very long dream for decades,” Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, said in a statement. “For example, you can combine oxygen molecules to form O2 and O3 (ozone), but not O4, and for some molecules you can’t form even a three-particle molecule. So it was an open question: Can you add more photons to a molecule to make bigger and bigger things?”