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Physics World

The revolution that has not stopped

Published Jun 1, 2005• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/18/6/13

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News Briefs

Researchers at JILA, a joint program of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, recently announced that they achieved a temperature far lower than any previously produced and created an entirely new state of matter predicted 70 years ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.A paper in the July 14 Science by the researchers describe how the team cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 nK above absolute zero.The extreme cold caused the individual atoms to condense into a ''superatom'' that behaved as a single entity.Before photographing the superatomknown as a Bose-Einstein condensate-the physicists cooled the atoms to 20 nK above absolute zero, the lowest temperature ever achieved.The achievement climaxed a 15 year search by physicists worldwide for the condensate.

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WHEN the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman from JILA in Boulder, Colorado, and to Wolfgang Ketterle from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they were recognized for creating and studying Bose–Einstein condensates – dilute gases of atoms that are all in the same quantum state. Their remarkable achievement enabled "quantum gases" to be studied experimentally for the first time, and jump-started new sub-fields of research, including gaseous superfluidity, atom lasers and matter–wave optics.

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Tornadoes, waterspouts and other atmospheric vortices are instanriy recognizable, but a detailed microscopic understanding of these phenomena continues to elude scientists. The same is true of vortices in super-fluids such as helium-4. Superfluids can flow without friction at low temperatures because the helium-4 atoms, which are bosons, all accumulate in the same quantum state, forming a Bose-Einstein condensate. Yet the strong interactions between the helium-4 atoms have hindered in-depth studies of the microscopic nature of superfluidity. Now Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and co-workers at the JILA laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, have created a vortex in a dilute gas of rubidium-87, another Bose-Einstein condensate (M Matthews et at. 1999 Plys. Rev. Lett. 83 2498).

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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.
The phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), first predicted by Einstein 70 years ago, has finally been observed in the laboratory. In this elusive state of matter the concept of individual particles ceases to have meaning: the atoms condense into the same quantum state and act as a single entity that displays quantum mechanical behaviour on a macroscopic scale. The condensate was observed when Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and colleagues at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado, cooled a dilute gas of rubidium atoms, confined in a magnetic trap, to a temperature of just a few nanoKelvin (M H Anderson et al. 1995 Science 269 198).
Researchers at JILA, a joint program of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, recently announced that they achieved a temperature far lower than any previously produced and created an entirely new state of matter predicted 70 years ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.A paper in the July 14 Science by the researchers describe how the team cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 nK above absolute zero.The extreme cold caused the individual atoms to condense into a ''superatom'' that behaved as a single entity.Before photographing the superatomknown as a Bose-Einstein condensate-the physicists cooled the atoms to 20 nK above absolute zero, the lowest temperature ever achieved.The achievement climaxed a 15 year search by physicists worldwide for the condensate.
WHEN the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman from JILA in Boulder, Colorado, and to Wolfgang Ketterle from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they were recognized for creating and studying Bose–Einstein condensates – dilute gases of atoms that are all in the same quantum state. Their remarkable achievement enabled "quantum gases" to be studied experimentally for the first time, and jump-started new sub-fields of research, including gaseous superfluidity, atom lasers and matter–wave optics.
Tornadoes, waterspouts and other atmospheric vortices are instanriy recognizable, but a detailed microscopic understanding of these phenomena continues to elude scientists. The same is true of vortices in super-fluids such as helium-4. Superfluids can flow without friction at low temperatures because the helium-4 atoms, which are bosons, all accumulate in the same quantum state, forming a Bose-Einstein condensate. Yet the strong interactions between the helium-4 atoms have hindered in-depth studies of the microscopic nature of superfluidity. Now Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and co-workers at the JILA laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, have created a vortex in a dilute gas of rubidium-87, another Bose-Einstein condensate (M Matthews et at. 1999 Plys. Rev. Lett. 83 2498).