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Science

SITE VISIT: Talking Condensates

Published Jul 17, 1998• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

After physicists rocked the world 3 years ago by coaxing supercold rubidium gas into a new form of matter, dozens of labs have sprung into hot pursuit of Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC), a state in which individual atoms merge and act as a single giant atom. On the Web, the condensate community congregates at the BEC page hosted by Georgia Southern University in Statesboro.

DOI
10.1126/science.281.5375.303b

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After physicists rocked the world 3 years ago by coaxing supercold rubidium gas into a new form of matter, dozens of labs have sprung into hot pursuit of Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC), a state in which individual atoms merge and act as a single giant atom. On the Web, the condensate community congregates at the BEC page hosted by Georgia Southern University in Statesboro.
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).
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).
A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first of which was shown experimentally 22 years ago, isn’t your garden variety state of matter. It formed at a fraction above absolute zero and only in atoms that act like bosons, one of two types of fundamental particles. Bosons don’t follow the Pauli exclusion principle, which prohibits two particles from existing in the same quantum state. When bosonic atoms are cooled to form a condensate, they can lose their individuality. They behave like one big collective superatom, analogous to how photons become indistinguishable in a laser beam. But it’s even weirder than that. This velocity-distribution data for a gas of rubidium atoms confirmed the discovery of the Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. In these three snapshots in time, atoms—cooled to near absolute zero—condensed from less dense areas on the left (red, yellow, and green) to very dense areas at the center and the right (blue and white). Image courtesy of NIST/JILA/CU-Boulder. “In a very good analogy, one can view a BEC as a bell, which begins to ring spontaneously when it is cooled below a certain temperature,” writes physicist Nick Proukakis at the Joint Quantum Centre Durham–Newcastle in the United Kingdom, in Universal Themes of Bose–Einstein Condensation , a forthcoming collection of research essays on progress in BECs (1). That behavior provides physicists with an extraordinary opportunity: to study bizarre quantum effects on a large scale, instead of having to probe individual particles. For the last two decades, physicists have treated BECs something like Play-Doh. They poke it, smash it, tickle it with lasers, and trap it in magnetic fields. They mix condensates together to see what happens, and use it to slow down light (2). They have observed strange behaviors that would have been impossible to predict even two decades ago: solids that flow …
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.
When the atoms in a gas are cooled to extremely low temperatures, their quantum-mechanical nature starts to dominate the properties of the whole gas. Under the appropriate conditions, the atoms will 'condense' into a single quantum state of the system-a phenomenon known as Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). The resulting 'condensate' behaves as a single, observable quantum-mechanical object. During the last decade, this new state of matter has displayed many remarkable properties. In this paper, we review some of the most recent experimental developments in the BEC field, highlighting the role of atomic interactions and the high degree of control with which condensates may be manipulated.
Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) were formed five years ago from rubidium-87 and sodium atoms, whose interactions are repulsive. BECs were also formed from lithium-7 atoms, which attract one another. (See the article by Wolfgang Ketterle in PHYSICS TODAY, December 1999, page 30.) Now researchers in Boulder, Colorado, have created a single condensate of rubidium-85 atoms, which can be taken continuously from the repulsive to the attractive regimes. The experimenters can vary the strength of the interaction between the atoms in their condensate by a factor of 100 or more—and even flip its sign—by changing the external magnetic field. The ability to tune the interactions of a condensate opens the door to systematic explorations of atomic behavior in new regimes.