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Physics Today

Clouds of atoms act like bouncing balls

Barbara Goss Levi

Published May 12, 2011• 0 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1063/pt.4.0903

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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.

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We started to investigate quantum mechanics by considering only the quantization of magnetic arrows. In our explorations we found out that the magnetic arrow had some funny properties (for example, it was possible that m x did not have a definite value), but at first it seemed that other properties, such as the position of an atom, behaved in the familiar classical way. Eventually (section 9.3) we found that it was also possible to have an atom without a definite value for its position. In this chapter, we investigate what happens when we apply quantum mechanics to a particle's position. Ball bouncing from a floor This chapter will show our framework for quantum mechanics in action, by applying it to the problem of a ball bouncing from a floor. Let us use a very fast ball, such as an electron, so that we can ignore the force of gravity. (We restrict ourselves to an electron that is moving fast on a human scale but slow compared to the speed of light, so that relativistic considerations don't come into play. Also, the magnetic arrow associated with the electron has no effect on the phenomena described in this chapter, so I won't mention it again.) Imagine a source of balls that could send a ball flying in any direction, for example a hot tungsten filament that boils off electrons. Suppose a ball begins at point P , bounces off the floor, and ends up at point Q . (Points P and Q are equally distant from the floor.

Cambridge University Press eBooks•Feb 24, 2000•0 citations

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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.
We started to investigate quantum mechanics by considering only the quantization of magnetic arrows. In our explorations we found out that the magnetic arrow had some funny properties (for example, it was possible that m x did not have a definite value), but at first it seemed that other properties, such as the position of an atom, behaved in the familiar classical way. Eventually (section 9.3) we found that it was also possible to have an atom without a definite value for its position. In this chapter, we investigate what happens when we apply quantum mechanics to a particle's position. Ball bouncing from a floor This chapter will show our framework for quantum mechanics in action, by applying it to the problem of a ball bouncing from a floor. Let us use a very fast ball, such as an electron, so that we can ignore the force of gravity. (We restrict ourselves to an electron that is moving fast on a human scale but slow compared to the speed of light, so that relativistic considerations don't come into play. Also, the magnetic arrow associated with the electron has no effect on the phenomena described in this chapter, so I won't mention it again.) Imagine a source of balls that could send a ball flying in any direction, for example a hot tungsten filament that boils off electrons. Suppose a ball begins at point P , bounces off the floor, and ends up at point Q . (Points P and Q are equally distant from the floor.