Exploring Superstrings in the Lab

ultracool writes "Physicists at Utrecht University in the Netherlands have come up with a way of observing a superstring by utilizing Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). A one-dimensional BEC in an optical lattice is rapidly rotated, causing a quantized vortex to form. The bosonic part of the superstring consists of this vortex line. Inside the vortex, they would trap an ultracold cloud of fermionic atoms. Hopefully this will allow observation of the supersymmetry between bosons and fermions, thus providing the first experimental evidence to support superstring theory."

Comments

MOD PARENT UP!

[Dr. Weird]

This is an important point that I think the article really butchers: as far as I can tell (and I am a condensed matter physicist), they are *NOT* actually creating fundamental superstrings, i.e. those predicted by string theory. Rather, they are creating objects in BEC's that behave in exactly the same way as predicted by that theory.

To use a computational analogy, they are simulating the equations of string theory using a BEC as the computer. So whatever results they get had better agree with string theory! They aren't actually testing whether these explain the world, just exploring the equations of string theory with an efficient computer -- the BEC.