Items tagged with "BEC"
Quantum gas reveals first signs of path-bending monopole
Magnets, whether in the form of a bar, horseshoe or electromagnet, always have two poles. If you break a magnet in half, you’ll end up with two new magnets, each with its own magnetic north and south.
But some physics theories predict the existence of single-pole magnets—a situation akin to electric charges, which come in either positive or negative chunks. One particular incarnation—called the Yang monopole after its discoverer—was originally predicted in the context of high-energy physics, but it has never been observed.
Atoms may hum a tune from grand cosmic symphony
Researchers playing with a cloud of ultracold atoms uncovered behavior that bears a striking resemblance to the universe in microcosm. Their work, which forges new connections between atomic physics and the sudden expansion of the early universe, was published April 19 in Physical Review X and featured in Physics.
Destabilized solitons perform a disappearing act
When your heart beats, blood courses through your veins in waves of pressure. These pressure waves manifest as your pulse, a regular rhythm unperturbed by the complex internal structure of the body. Scientists call such robust waves solitons, and in many ways they behave more like discrete particles than waves. Soliton theory may aid in the understanding of tsunamis, which—unlike other water waves—can sustain themselves over vast oceanic distances.
Atomic beltway could solve problems of cosmic gravity
When is a traffic jam not a traffic jam? When it's a quantum traffic jam, of course. Only in quantum physics can traffic be standing still and moving at the same time.
Ultra-cold atoms may wade through quantum friction
Theoretical physicists studying the behavior of ultra-cold atoms have discovered a new source of friction, dispensing with a century-old paradox in the process. Their prediction, which experimenters may soon try to verify, was reported recently in Physical Review Letters.
Quantum cycles power cold-atom pump
The idea of a pump is at least as old as the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Archimedes. More than 2000 years ago, Archimedes allegedly invented a corkscrew pump that could lift water up an incline with the turn of a handle. Versions of the ancient invention still bear his name and are used today in agriculture and industry.
Measuring the magnetization of wandering spins
The swirling field of a magnet—rendered visible by a sprinkling of iron filings—emerges from the microscopic behavior of atoms and their electrons. In permanent magnets, neighboring atoms align and lock into place to create inseparable north and south poles. For other materials, magnetism can be induced by a field strong enough to coax atoms into alignment.
Shaking Bosons into Fermions
Particles can be classified as bosons or fermions. A defining characteristic of a boson is its ability to pile into a single quantum state with other bosons. Fermions are not allowed to do this. One broad impact of fermionic anti-social behavior is that it allows for carbon-based life forms, like us, to exist. If the universe were solely made from bosons, life would certainly not look like it does. Recently, JQI theorists* have proposed an elegant method for achieving transmutation--that is, making bosons act like fermions.
Frigid Ytterbium
For many years rubidium has been a workhorse in the investigation of ultracold atoms. Now JQI scientists are using Rb to cool another species, ytterbium, an element prized for its possible use in advanced optical clocks and in studying basic quantum phenomena. Yb shows itself useful in another way: it comes in numerous available isotopes, some of which are bosonic in nature and some fermionic.
At the edge of a quantum gas
From NIST-PML--JQI scientists have achieved a major milestone in simulating the dynamics of condensed-matter systems – such as the behavior of charged particles in semiconductors and other materials – through manipulation of carefully controlled quantum-mechanical models.