Slashdot Mirror
Nobel Prize In Physics For Bose-Einstein Condensate
LMCBoy writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics today. The award went to scientists who managed to construct a Bose-Einstein condensate from Rubidium and Sodium atoms. The process involves cooling the atoms to about 20 nanoKelvin. From the press release: 'A laser beam differs from the light from an ordinary light bulb in several ways. In the laser the light particles all have the same energy and oscillate together. To cause matter also to behave in this controlled way has long been a challenge for researchers. This year's Nobel Laureates have succeeded - they have caused atoms to "sing in unison" - thus discovering a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate.'" This is the same reasearch that Hemos recently posted about.
So does this put us closer to getting transporters?
I know more than a few folks I'd want to reduce to simple energy.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
As I recall, I was able to create the Bose-Einstein condensate in my kitchen sink once. Man, all that hard work, and THESE guys get the Nobel for it... Well, better them than me, leaves me more time for programming...
information is immaterial
Just imagine all the cool speakers they will be selling soon, with nobel prize winning scientists working for them!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Jeez... now I have yet another state and a crapload of equations to memorize. What's the enthalpy? The spontaneity?
We need a short form name. Solid, liquid, gas and Bose-Einstein condensate really just... doesn't work out that well in the naming scheme.
From the Physics department here at the University of Colorado, I consider myself lucky to work with folks like Dr. Weiman (one of the Nobel recipients) and others in the field, and congratulate all the Nobel winners for this year.
On that note, you can read all about Bose-Einstein Condensate and more at Physics 2000, our award-winning interactive journey through modern physics! The site is here:
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000
Our Bose-Einstein Condensate section is one of the most popular, check it out and learn more!
Ryan Bruels
Technical Consultant
Physics 2000
Center for Integrated Plasma Studies
University of Colorado, Boulder
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
Unfortunately you couldn't use them as superconductors, as just about any amount of energy added to the system knocks the condensate out of its lowest energy (ground) state and "poof" no more BEC, just some cold gas.
A maser is Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation and have nothing to do with Bose-Einstein condensates. You are probably thinking of so called "matter lasers" which are related. The B-E condensate is only a component of that.
Particles that can all have the same EXACT state, in quantum mechanical terms, are called bosons. They fill and occupy available states in a certain way, described by a Bose distribution. An example of bosons are photons, or light, which can all be in the same state at the same time, hence making the maser and laser possible. Opposite to these are fermions, e.g. electrons, which cannot occupy the same state and are subject to Fermi-Dirac statistics.
What makes B-E condensates cool, no pun intended, is through cooling and laser pumping all the atoms can be made to be in the exact state. This allows all kinds of neat things to happen. Such as the "matter laser" or the actual slowing down and stopping of light (I'm to lazy to look up the link but check out Scientific American's website).
Pretty neat stuff.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
Check out the hardware that they apparently used for this. I assume its what they used to control the device.
I guess its just a reminder that sometimes slow and simple out weighs fast and new. It'd be interesting to know just what sort of hardware and software they used to create this. The article on the Colorado page give some details, saying that diode lasers were used and that the apparatus was simple and inexpensive. It's neat to think not all cutting edge physics needs super expensive and complicated devices like cyclotrons.
_sig_ is away
Rubidium and sodium have the intresting property that, when combined, they condense at around 35 kilojoules, very close to the famed Velhany constant.
However, it is also very difficult to find these two atoms in a pure form. The only good way to do it is to spin basic molecules containing these two elements through xeon gas within a 20 megagauss accellerator, of which there is only two in the world. Once you have them, it is very hard to keep them from combining with other elements again. You must immediatly cool them to around 3 Kelvin or you'll have to start all over again.
To actualy produce temperatures like 20 nano Kelvin, you can't use other materials (such as liquid nitrogen). The best way is to use two large magnets and a laser. If aligned properly, the magnets will actualy bend the laser around the atoms, producing a sort of barrier that will not allow energy in, but will allow it to escape. The magnets have the secondary effect of helping suck energy out of the material.
(Yes, I made all this up. I want to see how many people slashdotters flame me for all this BS when they haven't read this far down. Yes, I have karma to burn.)
Not a typewriter
"Does anyone agree that a Nobel prize may be better given to someone who finds a practical use for a technology than just making a new discovery?"
Hopefully not, for rather obvious reasons.
Huh? A superconductor by definition already conducts current perfectly. There's no "best" superconductor in that sense, they're all the same (perfect). What people are researching now is high-temperature superconductors, which this is most definitively not (at 20 millikelvin).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Masers were the predecessors to lasers, producing microwave wavelength radiation instead of visible light. And saying that the research was done years ago is putting it mildly - IIRC masers were largely developed in the 50's, gas lasers in the 60's. They have absolutely nothing to do with this recent research.
That said, it's possible that some reporter with absolutely no technical background abbreviated "matter laser" to "maser," but that would be a mistake since it causes immense confusion to anyone who remembers the original definition. If you meant "matter laser," then say so.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Uh, I mean nanokelvin. Sorry.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
That's what high school science doesn't explain properly. Energy is a mathematical property...
There's not really any such thing as 'pure energy'.
I thought the big deal about Bose-Einstein condensates was their indeterminate size. Since cooling matter down to nearly absolute zero halts motion, and since zero motion is a very measurable quantity, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that the actual location of the electrons becomes indeterminate, and therefore the size of the atomic shell grows bigger. Not sure what implications this fact has, though, but it's kinda neat. If anything ever were to be cooled to absolute zero, it would be of infinite size.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
A-one, and a-two...
Cumbayah, My Lord, Cumbayah.
Cumbayah, My Lord, Cumbayah.
Oh, Lord, Cumbayah.
Someone's splitting, My Lord, Cumbayah.
Someone's splitting, My Lord, Cumbayah.
Oh, Lord, Cumbayah.
Someone's fusing, My Lord, Cumbayah.
Someone's fusing, My Lord, Cumbayah.
Oh, Lord, Cumbayah.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This Yahoo! News story about the Nobel prize includes discussion of potential applications.
Bose-Einstein matter was predicted decades ago. But the experimental cleverness to reach absolute zero and this state was only reached a few years ago. The prize is for this cleverness.
Second, not all othe the phenomena of this state were predicted by the theory, so new things were learned.
It sounds like one of the theorists (B)
and it looks like other (E).
It behaves very strangely compared to other matter.
"On November 27, 1895, a year before his death, Alfred Nobel signed the famous will which would implement some of the goals to which he had devoted so much of his life. Nobel stipulated in his will that most of his estate, more than SEK 31 million (today approximately SEK 1,500 million) should be converted into a fund and invested in "safe securities."
The income from the investments was to be "distributed annually in the form of prizes to those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."
The Nobel Foundation is a private institution established in 1900 on the basis of the will. The investment policy of the Foundation is naturally of paramount importance to the preservation and, if possible the augmentation of the funds and, thus, of the prize amount. According to the original 1901 investment rules, the term "safe securities" was, in the spirit of that time, interpreted to mean gilt-edged bonds or loans backed by such securities or backed by mortgages on real estate. With the changes brought about by the two World Wars and their economic and financial aftermath, the term "safe securities" had to be reinterpreted in the light of prevailing economic conditions and tendencies. Thus, at the request of the Foundation's Board of Directors, in the early 1950s the Swedish Government sanctioned changes, whereby the Board for all practical purposes was given a free hand to invest not only in real estate, bonds and secured loans, but also in most types of stocks.
From 1901, when the first prizes (SEK 150,000 each) were awarded, the prize amounts declined steadily. But with this freedom to invest, along with the long-fought-for tax-exemption granted in 1946, it was possible to reverse this trend and, on average, even keep pace with increasing inflation. The real value of the prize amount in SEK terms was finally restored in 1991. The amount of the 2001 Nobel Prize is SEK 10.0 million, an increase of around 11 per cent compared to the 2000 Prizes.
The investment capital at market value as per December 31, 2000, amounted to SEK 3,894 million (approx. USD 409 million). Foreign and Swedish assets accounted for 52 and 48 per cent, respectively."
link...
There's also a table there breaking down the investments in more detail, but it was too big a PITA to get it to post correctly.
Don't you find it a bit scary that during experiments like this, we're cooling matter to a temperature that's a billion times colder than the background ratiation of the universe (3K), creating, for a brief period of time, what is likely to be the coldest matter in the entire universe? Who knows what weird physics we could unintentionally unleash!
that was because it was some dumbed down version of IIS that limited the connections to 10, and no one around here cares enough about windows to figure out the right registry settings (me neither).
so instead of fixing it i downloaded apache and configged it in about 5 minutes. maybe less.
since then it appears that web browsing has been a bit smoother. i checked the web log, which is normally about 200k on any given day, but by 4pm today is had grown to 17 MEGABYTES. ha! at it's peak we were serving around 10 megabytes per minute in pdfs, jpegs, etc. we have served 1.7 gigs so far today. whew.
so now that it's fixed, come on in and check it out. go to ketterle, then research, and especially check out rubidium.
and while i'm here, let me just say that wolfgang ketterle is one of the nicest people i have ever worked for. he, and everyone else here at MIT just kicks ass. wolfgang had gone to bed at 2:30am last night, and was awoken at 5:30am by some strange swedish dude...
later,
muerte
Having just reread "Genius", Feynman apparently wanted to turn his down because he didn't want the fame/publicity. Of course, if you turn it down, then you have to deal with the publicity from that!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
No, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to whoever makes the greatest contribution to... physics! Someone who developed a key procedure to eliminate the plague of AIDS would be likely to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine though.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
The basic requirement of superconductance is that electrons go bosonic, whereby a huge number of them can reach the same quantum state. So in a way there is B-E condensation in superconductors, but only that of electron pairs, not entire atoms as in the 1995 experiment.
BEC of atoms is not terribly exciting news for superconductance, unless you want super-transfer of atoms instead of electrons.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I listened to CNN sporadically today. Several times, I heard the CNN talking heads report on this Nobel award. Each time they only reported the names of the winners and that it was for "research in low temperature gases".
In each case, the 2nd news-reader (don't call these clowns reporters, please) turned to the 1st news-reader and made some lame comment about "boy is THAT way over my head (wink wink giggle)". They didn't mention the term "Bose-Einstein Condensate" nor did they attempt to explain WHY the BEC work would be worthy of a Nobel Prize.
Is it any wonder why the level of science illiteracy in the USA is so high?
IV
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
Satyendranath Bose was a Indian Physicist.
Bosons (named after him) are particles that can be in the same quantum state.
The consequence of that is they can be in the same location.
While Fermions (such as electrons) cannot be in the same location (unless they are in Cooper pairs, which is how superconductors work, but I digress).
This is why electrons must exist in ever increasing shells around an atom -- they can never be in the same "location".
Einstein's contribution (at least I think this was his contribution), is to propose the following:
As well all know
To explain: If a particle is at location 'x', think of a Gaussian function centered at 'x', where the height of the function determines the probability that the particle is at that location.
A particle that is very well localized is traveling very fast, and vise versa.
And as the particle slows, the particle is less well localized, and it's wave function (that Gaussian) widens.
As Bosons (of the same type, say Rubidium atoms) cool, they slow down.
As they slow down, their wave functions expand.
At some point, their wave functions will overlap.
Now here is the cool bit. The atoms are in different quantum states and different internal energy levels to start with, but as soon as their wave functions overlap enough, they ALL immediately drop down to their ground state (which is the same for all of them), and you can no longer distinguish which atom is which!
The analogy would be to imagine an orchestra.
They are all tuning their instruments, but because they are all moving very fast, they cannot hear each other, and all the instruments are (or can be) in a slightly different tune.
When they all slow down (in the same room), they can hear each other, and suddenly they all become in tune with each other.
Not a very good analogy, I know.
Oh! I almost forgot. To cool the sample down to 20 nanoKelvin(?), this is what they do:
Of course once the condensate forms you can't measure it, b/c as soon as you try the damn thing evaporates!
So you have to observe it using other means....
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
This is the same reasearch that Hemos recently posted about.
This is not surprising. Longtime readers of Slashdot know that Hemos routinely nails all of Nobel prize winners in a given year. The only drama was whether the Bose-Einstein guys would beat the particle accelerator guys and 'Young Einstein' himself Yahoo Serious for the physics prize.
Here's a question I've always wondered about regarding BECs. Say you make one out of a cloud of radioactive atoms. You hold the cloud together long enough to where if it were NOT a BEC, some of the atoms would decay. What happens? Does the waveform of the whole cloud change? When the cloud warms up, how does it decide which atoms not to reconstitute because they are "gone"?
>You seem to be saying that we need 2^N amount of
:-) Still, it's a large number of particles, so N is huge, and when you start addressing trying to also store their positions and velocities in any sort of detail (which is a bit of a problem in itself, due to Heisenberg) you see that even obtaining the data, much less storing them, is a bit of a problem. Not to mention that you still have to transfer that information to the site where the object is to be reconstructed, which takes finite time, sometimes large finite time.
>space to store the spins? No we don't. You said
>it yourself: there are 2^N possible values that
>can be stored, and this requires precisely N
>amount of storage space. Say we have ten
>particles, that requires ten bits to store the
>spins, not 2^10 (1024) bits!.
Oops... I was in a hurry
Thanks for pointing out that mistake.
Matt Reece