25 years of BEC

Mark Keil, Omer Amit, Shuyu Zhou +3 more

Here we review the field of atom chips in the context of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BEC) as well as cold matter in general. Twenty years after the first realization of the BEC and 15 years after the realization of the atom chip, the latter has been found to enable extraordinary feats: from producing BECs at a rate of several per second, through the realization of matter-wave interferometry, and all the way to novel probing of surfaces and new forces. In addition, technological applications are also being intensively pursued. This review will describe these developments and more, including new ideas which have not yet been realized.

Carl Wieman

David W. Snoke, G. M. Kavoulakis

Experiments on Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of excitons in the semiconductor Cu2O started over 30 years ago, as one of the first serious attempts at exciton BEC. Early claims were based on spectroscopic signatures and transport data which have since been reinterpreted, in large part because the Auger recombination process for excitons was not well understood. Understanding of the Auger process has advanced, and recent experiments have made significant progress toward exciton BEC. We review the history of experiments on exciton BEC in Cu2O, the Auger recombination process, and the prospects for observing exciton BEC in this system in the near future.

Anonymous

Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato, K. M. F. Magalhães, Jorge Amin Seman +5 more

This text corresponds to part of the course presented at the ELAF XXXVIII. It is composed of work previously done along the years. The level of this introduction follows the last year of undergraduate and first year of graduate courses. We apologize to the experts on this field, but the idea here is to provide the basic principles and tools for students just getting involved with this topic. For those interested in a deeper reading on the subject, we strongly recommend the review article published by Courteille, Bagnato and Yukalov [1] from which part of this text was extracted. The lecture is divided in three parts: an introduction, the basic concepts of Bose‐Einstein Condensation and information about making and probing BECs.

Philip F. Schewe