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Physics World

Ultracold gases break records

Published Oct 1, 2003• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Physicists continue to make breakthroughs in the field of Bose–Einstein condensation. Wolfgang Ketterle and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have succeeded in cooling a Bose condensate of sodium atoms down to 450 pK, which is the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Innsbruck have produced a Bose condensate of cesium molecules for the first time.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/16/10/3

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•Feb 15, 2007•0 citations
Physicists continue to make breakthroughs in the field of Bose–Einstein condensation. Wolfgang Ketterle and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have succeeded in cooling a Bose condensate of sodium atoms down to 450 pK, which is the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Innsbruck have produced a Bose condensate of cesium molecules for the first time.
At 10.54 a.m. on Monday 5 June 1995 a group of physicists at the JILA laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, created something that had never been seen before – a Bose – Einstein condensate made of atoms. Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and colleagues had made a new state of matter by cooling a gas of rubidium-87 atoms to a temperature of just 170 nK. This was so cold that the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms was comparable with the distance between them, causing the atoms to condense into the same quantum ground state. The breakthrough in Boulder kick-started an intense period of research into the properties of ultracold atoms that continues to this day, and has implications for topics as diverse as super-fluidity and the early universe.
Clouds of atoms cooled to almost absolute zero can form a collective state--in effect, a giant atom--called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The stability of a BEC depends almost entirely on how the atoms making it up interact one-on-one, and collisions of ultracold atoms provide a glimpse of these interactions. In a first-ever detection, a group of researchers in Paris has gotten cesium atoms to form ordinary molecules chilled to 300 millionths of a kelvin--something only seen before with atoms--which could be the first step toward studying complex materials in the world of the ultracold.
A year ago this month, physicists first created a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in which a cloud of trapped atoms is cooled so close to absolute zero that their quantum-mechanical waves merge. But with barely 1000 atoms in a condensate that lasted just a few seconds, the researchers could do no more than say they'd done it. Now the field is being transformed by a new atom trap that can create condensates of 5 million sodium atoms that survive for half a minute and a new technique for imaging condensates without destroying them. Several research groups are now probing the size, growth rate, optical properties, and even the viscosity of this new form of matter.
Research into Bose–Einstein condensation has advanced at a rapid pace since this unique state of matter was first produced in 1995. Now the pace is set to quicken even further with the announcement by three groups of faster and simpler techniques for creating Bose condensates. Physicists at Tübingen University in Germany, and independently at the Ludwig Maximilans University in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, have formed rubidium condensates in miniaturized traps (amo.phy.gasou.edu/bec.html/popular.html). Meanwhile, a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology has demonstrated an all-optical technique for producing condensates (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2001 87 010404).
The rate of progress in the field of ultracold atomic gases over the past decade has been remarkable. Ever since the first Bose–Einstein condensate was produced in rubidium-87 exactly 10 years ago this month, a string of ground-breaking results has flowed from laboratories around the world. Indeed, since the Physics World website started publishing its highlights of the year in 1997, ultracold gases have only failed to make the list once (in 2000). In recent years attention has switched to degenerate Fermi gases,which are shaping up to be just as exciting (see pages 8–9).
Abstract The invention and development of laser methods for cooling and trapping atoms have led to the advent of the physics of ultracold matter. Low-temperature quantum physics has so far dealt with condensed media, wherein quantum phenomena (superfluidity and superconductivity) usually manifest themselves at temperatures of a few kelvin. Laser cooling and trapping of atoms have made it possible to successively attain millikelvin, microkelvin, and nanokelvin temperatures, at which the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms becomes commensurable with the interatomic separation, even in dilute gases. The interaction of atoms in ultracold dilute gases becomes essentially quantum mechanical. The physics of such quantum gases is more akin to the well-developed physics of condensed matter at low temperatures. It is in essence a boundary field between atomic, laser, and condensed-matter physics. Following the first, pioneering experiments on the Bose–Einstein condensation of alkali-metal atoms, this field has continued to develop at a very fast pace, which can be explained by the vast variety of particles (atoms, isotopes, and molecules) that can be laser cooled and trapped under degeneracy conditions. This is much more than physicists had at their disposal previously (3,4He). Moreover, laser radiation and magnetic fields additionally make it possible to control not only the intrinsic quantum state of the interacting ultracold particle species, but also the interaction of the particles. All this makes the research in the field of quantum gases a great breakthrough, both in atomic–molecular physics and in many-body-interaction physics, which heretofore was the prerogative of low-temperature condensed-matter physics.