Very Cold Indeed: The Nanokelvin Physics of Bose-Einstein Condensation.
As atoms get colder, they start to behave more like waves and less like particles. Cool a cloud of identical atoms so cold that the wave of each atom starts to overlap with the wave of its neighbor atom, and all of a sudden you wind up with a sort of quantum identity crisis known as Bose-Einstein condensation. How do we get something that cold? And what is the nature of the strange goop that results? These questions were addressed in a colloquium at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on February 23, 1996. This paper is an edited transcript of that presentation.
JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309.
Eric
E
Cornell
Bose-Einstein condensation; atom laser; atom traps; evaporative cooling; superfluids and supergasses