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Science

A New Recipe for Atom Condensates

Gary Taubes

Published Jan 31, 1997• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A group at the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder has serendipitously created two Bose-Einstein condensates—each one a crowd of atoms in a single quantum state—in a supercooled magnetic trap. Their cooling technique worked directly on only one of the condensates, but the other one cooled “sympathetically,” which suggests that the strategy could be used to condense

DOI
10.1126/science.275.5300.617b

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A group at the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder has serendipitously created two Bose-Einstein condensates—each one a crowd of atoms in a single quantum state—in a supercooled magnetic trap. Their cooling technique worked directly on only one of the condensates, but the other one cooled “sympathetically,” which suggests that the strategy could be used to condense
Research into Bose–Einstein condensation has advanced at a rapid pace since this unique state of matter was first produced in 1995. Now the pace is set to quicken even further with the announcement by three groups of faster and simpler techniques for creating Bose condensates. Physicists at Tübingen University in Germany, and independently at the Ludwig Maximilans University in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, have formed rubidium condensates in miniaturized traps (amo.phy.gasou.edu/bec.html/popular.html). Meanwhile, a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology has demonstrated an all-optical technique for producing condensates (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2001 87 010404).
Everyone likes a bargain, and what could be better than two for the price of one? That's what researchers in Boulder, Colorado, must have figured when they snared not just one but two spin states of the rubidium atom in an ultracold trap and simultaneously formed overlapping Bose–Einstein condensates from them. The feat—accomplished by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and their colleagues at JILA, the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder—gives a valuable tool to those interested in atomic collisions and their dependence on spin states, as well as to those interested in further exploration of interactions between and within condensates. As William Phillips of NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, points out, such a double condensate, of two different internal states of the same atom, is unlike anything seen in superfluid He4, a condensed-matter Bose–Einstein condensate.
The phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), first predicted by Einstein 70 years ago, has finally been observed in the laboratory. In this elusive state of matter the concept of individual particles ceases to have meaning: the atoms condense into the same quantum state and act as a single entity that displays quantum mechanical behaviour on a macroscopic scale. The condensate was observed when Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and colleagues at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado, cooled a dilute gas of rubidium atoms, confined in a magnetic trap, to a temperature of just a few nanoKelvin (M H Anderson et al. 1995 Science 269 198).
A year ago this month, physicists first created a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in which a cloud of trapped atoms is cooled so close to absolute zero that their quantum-mechanical waves merge. But with barely 1000 atoms in a condensate that lasted just a few seconds, the researchers could do no more than say they'd done it. Now the field is being transformed by a new atom trap that can create condensates of 5 million sodium atoms that survive for half a minute and a new technique for imaging condensates without destroying them. Several research groups are now probing the size, growth rate, optical properties, and even the viscosity of this new form of matter.
Since researchers created the first Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) 3 years ago, they have been eagerly exploring this new state of matter and seeing what can be done with it—turning it into an atom laser, for example (see main text). But the magnetic traps used to confine the condensates put some kinds of studies off limits, because the magnetic fields freeze the spins of the trapped atoms in one orientation. Now Wolfgang Ketterle and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have removed the barrier with a new kind of trap.