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Science

Molecule of the Year: A New Form of Matter Unveiled

Published Dec 22, 1995• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Physicists create the long-sought Bose-Einstein condensate, allowing easier exploration of quantum mechanics, while other researchers celebrate a new planet, a gene for eyes, brain images, and more ![Figure][1] Quantum portrait. Supercool Bose-condensed atoms peak near zero velocity. [M. R.

DOI
10.1126/science.270.5244.1902a

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Physicists create the long-sought Bose-Einstein condensate, allowing easier exploration of quantum mechanics, while other researchers celebrate a new planet, a gene for eyes, brain images, and more
![Figure][1]
Quantum portrait.
Supercool Bose-condensed atoms peak near zero velocity. [M. R.
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.
Researchers at JILA, a joint program of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, recently announced that they achieved a temperature far lower than any previously produced and created an entirely new state of matter predicted 70 years ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.A paper in the July 14 Science by the researchers describe how the team cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 nK above absolute zero.The extreme cold caused the individual atoms to condense into a ''superatom'' that behaved as a single entity.Before photographing the superatomknown as a Bose-Einstein condensate-the physicists cooled the atoms to 20 nK above absolute zero, the lowest temperature ever achieved.The achievement climaxed a 15 year search by physicists worldwide for the condensate.
A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first of which was shown experimentally 22 years ago, isn’t your garden variety state of matter. It formed at a fraction above absolute zero and only in atoms that act like bosons, one of two types of fundamental particles. Bosons don’t follow the Pauli exclusion principle, which prohibits two particles from existing in the same quantum state. When bosonic atoms are cooled to form a condensate, they can lose their individuality. They behave like one big collective superatom, analogous to how photons become indistinguishable in a laser beam. But it’s even weirder than that. This velocity-distribution data for a gas of rubidium atoms confirmed the discovery of the Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. In these three snapshots in time, atoms—cooled to near absolute zero—condensed from less dense areas on the left (red, yellow, and green) to very dense areas at the center and the right (blue and white). Image courtesy of NIST/JILA/CU-Boulder. “In a very good analogy, one can view a BEC as a bell, which begins to ring spontaneously when it is cooled below a certain temperature,” writes physicist Nick Proukakis at the Joint Quantum Centre Durham–Newcastle in the United Kingdom, in Universal Themes of Bose–Einstein Condensation , a forthcoming collection of research essays on progress in BECs (1). That behavior provides physicists with an extraordinary opportunity: to study bizarre quantum effects on a large scale, instead of having to probe individual particles. For the last two decades, physicists have treated BECs something like Play-Doh. They poke it, smash it, tickle it with lasers, and trap it in magnetic fields. They mix condensates together to see what happens, and use it to slow down light (2). They have observed strange behaviors that would have been impossible to predict even two decades ago: solids that flow …