Playing with atoms

Understanding atomic physics is child's play compared to understanding child's play.

Otto Robert Frisch

Christopher R. Ekstrom

Almost everyone has spent hours as a child bouncing rubber balls on hard surfaces. Later, we learn that the ball is made up of tightly bound atoms. The same game has been played by physicists at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris who have bounced a ball of trapped, cold caesium atoms more than eight times on a curved mirror created with laser light (C G Aminoff et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. (1993) 71 3083). This work could lead to experiments in which quantum collective effects of atoms play a major role.

Anonymous

Anonymous

Brett D. Esry, Hiroya Suno, Chris H. Greene

Three-body recombination can play an important role in experiments on ultracold atomic gases because it can produce significant atom loss. Such losses have been seen in Bose-Einstein condensates, but have been thought to play little role for degenerate Fermi gases. We show that under some circumstances, three-body recombination can be just as large in fermi systems as in bose systems. In particular, when there is a two-body resonance near threshold — as is often the case experimentally — the threshold suppression due to the Pauli principle no longer applies. 1