The creation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a cold vapor

Carl Wieman, Eric Cornell, D. S. Jin +6 more

Carl Wieman, Eric Cornell

Carl Wieman

David R. Lide

This chapter describes the National Bureau of Standards’ (NBS) Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) in a Dilute Atomic Vapor , relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. The first successful creation of dilute-gas BEC, announced in the NIST publication Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor , was both a natural continuation of a 75-year tradition of NBS pre-eminence in spectroscopy and a striking confirmation that present-day NIST research is at the cutting edge of modern technology. The scientific motivation to create and study BEC in a gas stemmed from the long-held belief that the mechanism underlying BEC is the same mechanism responsible for the mysterious effects of superconductivity and superfluidity. Much of the standards and metrology work that NIST is charged with performing relies on precise spectroscopy of various internal resonances in atoms.

Christopher R. Monroe, Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman

Dmitry Budker, Derek F Kimball, David P. DeMille

Abstract Laser cooling is an elegant and important tool that has been useful in many branches of atomic physics. For example, laser cooling has enabled the creation and study of Bose-Einstein condensates of dilute atomic vapors (Anderson et al. 1995, Bradley et al. 1995, Davis et al. 1995) and is a central feature in the latest generation of atomic clocks (Santarelli et al. 1999). The creation of cold atomic gases via laser cooling has provided a new venue in which to study atomic collision processes, nonlinear optical effects, and basic quantum-mechanical phenomena. There are innumerable excellent reviews on this vast subject – good starting points are the Nobel lectures by Chu (1998), Phillips (1998), and Cohen-Tannoudji (1998), as well as the text by Metcalf and Van der Straten (1999).