First 'Atomic Air Force' Observed

SeaDour writes "From the National Institute of Standards and Technology (the people who brought you the atomic clock) and the Unviersity of Colorado at Boulder (location of the world's first Bose-Einstein Condensate and Fermionic Condensate) comes the world's first observation of atoms "flying in formation". Atoms are normally expected to fly around through empty space quite haphazardly, constantly colliding with one another. But thanks to precision laser pulses and extremely cold temperatures, Jun Ye's team was able to correograph strontium atoms into the shape of a cube as they travelled across a vacuum chamber. "This 'really bizarre' behavior is believed to occur with all atoms under similar conditions.""

Comments

Honey, I shrunk the kids?

[rickbrodie]

If the normal behaviour of atoms is to whizz about individually, what does this new observation imply for the density of the material? If all the atoms are stacked up in some sort of lattice type structure (though they're not actually connected), then they'd be super-dense, not to mention super-strong right?