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.
For many years,
4He typified Bose-Einstein superfluids, but recent advances in dilute ultra-cold alkali-metal gases have provided new neutral superfluids that are particularly tractable because the system is dilute. This chapter starts with a brief review of the physics of superfluid
4He, followed by the basic ideas of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), first for an ideal Bose gas and then considering the effect of interparticle interactions, including time-dependent phenomena. Extensions to more exotic condensates include magnetic dipolar gases, mixtures of two components, and spinor condensates that require a focused infrared laser for trapping of all the various hyperfine magnetic states in a particular hyperfine
F manifold of
mF states. With an applied rotation, the trapped BECs nucleate quantized vortices. Recent theory and experiment have shown that laser coupling fields can mimic the effect of rotation. The resulting synthetic gauge fields have produced vortices in a nonrotating condensate.