Wolfgang Ketterle
Department of Physics, MIT
|
What happens when a gas is cooled to absolute zero? A new door to the
quantum world opens up because all the atoms start "marching in lockstep",
they form one giant matter wave - the Bose-Einstein condensate. This was
predicted by Einstein in 1925, but only realized in 1995. Since then, many
properties of this mysterious form of matter have been revealed including
matter wave amplification, miscibility and immiscibility of quantum gases,
and sound propagation. Bose condensates were used to realize a basic atom
laser, an intense source of coherent matter waves. The current focus is to
understand the properties of gases at nanokelvin temperatures. In the long
run, this ultimate control over atoms might lead to advances in metrology,
e.g. more precise atomic clocks. The talk will link basic concepts of
quantum mechanics with today's research, and discuss the techniques to cool
and manipulate matter at nanokelvin temperatures.
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 2.21. On 10 Sep 1999, 14:23. |