Researchers have observed the spectrum of an ultracold atomic gas that can exist as a superfluid or a Bose-Einstein condensate in a study that could provide clues to the nature of superconductivity.By
Physicists are getting closer and closer to the holy grail of research into ultracold atomic gases – the observation of superfluidity in a Fermi gas. Research groups in Austria and the US have recently taken a major step towards this goal by creating a Bose–Einstein condensate of bosonic molecules from a gas of fermionic atoms. If the atoms can be persuaded to form weakly bound pairs, rather than molecules, physicists hope to learn more about the basic mechanisms responsible for superconductivity.
As was shown by Einstein in 1924, Bose-Einstein statistics gives rise to a phase transition in which a macroscopic part of a gaseous state condenses into a phase with ground state properties, offering a unique view on the behavior of matter at zero temperature. From the very start the nature of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) has provoked statements concerning its relation with respect to superconductivity in electron gases (Einstein 1925) and the superfluidity of liquid helium (London 1938), but this connection is not easily grasped experimentally. Remarkably, although the concept of BEC appears routinely in very different contexts, ranging from excitons in semiconductors to nuclear matter, it had never been observed in its pure form, i.e., in a gaseous phase, until in 1995 BEC in ultracold Rb vapor was reported by Cornell and Wieman. Bose-Einstein condensation is probably the most exciting phenomenon currently under experimental investigation in ultracold atomic gases. In the tutorial the physics will be addressed which is at the roots of the current interest of BEC in atomic gases.
The quantum mechanical phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation appears throughout physics with manifestations ranging from superconductivity in metals to superfluidity in nuclei and neutron stars. In most cases the condensation emerges due to correlations or pairing of fermionic particles. We explore this quantum behavior in a uniquely controllable and clean system consisting of an ultracold gas of atoms. In particular, by tuning the interactions between the fermionic atoms that make up our ultracold gas we can create condensates consisting of pairs of correlated atoms. These experiments introduce the ability to access the intriguing crossover regime where the quantum behavior of fermions becomes intertwined with that of bosons.