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High Temperature Bose-Einstein Condensation Observed
ultracool writes "Two separate research groups claim to have observed Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in quasiparticles at much higher temperatures than atomic BEC — one at 19 Kelvin and the other at room temperature. The 19 K BEC was composed of half-matter, half-light quasi-particles called polaritons, and the room temperature condensate was composed of 'magnons' (packets of magnetic energy). There is some skepticism among physicists as to whether these really are BECs. If they are true BECs, these experiments are the first evidence of them in the solid state." Just in case you need a brush up on BEC, like I did, check out the Wikipedia article on Bose-Einstein condensation.
fp at about 298 Kelvin
I did check the Wikipedia article, and it just said something about how Einstien was still alive and that the effects of Bose-Einstien condensation had tripled over the last year...
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Okay seriously - I know it's convenient and all, but could we PLEASE link to something that isn't Wikipedia? That is, something where any passers-by can't just poke the "edit" button to hack the page?
A high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate? It can't be.
You know how the saying goes - "No highs, no lows, gotta be Bose!"
Oh wait, that's a different kind of Bose.
Nevermind.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I thought Bose-Einstein condensate was a completely different state of matter. How then, could it appear in a "solid state"?
"Yes, I do have something to hide - my shame."
In the time it took you to read that Wikipedia article, David Banh wrote and published a groundbreaking paper on the subject.
How can a mishmash of atoms collapsed into the same space (b-e condensate) have a 'solid state'? Their radius' overlap. Is this more like a gas freezing without any other transition?
Ryan Fenton
Oh, for the love of...
Editors, if you link a Wikipedia page from the summary, PLEASE link a historical revision. That way, whatever vandalism happens won't affect the link, and thus fewer people will be tempted to even vandalize at all.
Seriously, do the editors have any sense at all? It's not like this is a new problem.
I don't know how this can make the front page. Bose is overpriced junk. Thanks for the Slashvertisement!
But can you reverse the angular momentum of polaritrons in order to counteract a magneton beam?
Unfortunately I'm at home, so I can't read the actual articles.
The main thing I am wondering about is dimensionality. I've seen
lectures before where people have come up with pancake like-systems
that are *like* BECs at 1 Kelvin, but unfortunately you can't meet the
pedantic requirements for BEC in less than 3d.
But if these systems are 3d, then it seems reasonable. We are talking
about quasi-particles here. As one of these abstracts says, their
(effective) mass is much less than that of an atom, therefore for they
can have much higher energies than atoms of similar momentum. Because
BEC is all about getting (the uncertainty of) momentum * (uncertainty of)
position down below a magic number, it seems reasonable.
And whatever corrections are made won't be updated in the link, either. With many eyes, after all, all errors are shallow--isn't that the founding principle of Wikipedia? A crush of visitors should improve the article beyond anything seen in Britannica or the New York Post.
Wait, what?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Wronggg! The half-light (and presumably half-heavy) quasi-particles are NOT polaritons but bullshitons. If you can raise the temperature and magnetic saturation of these short-lived b'tons to greater than 300 Kelvin and 42 Hobbs respectively, the BECs will from condensates called crapons, which can spontaneously convert to energy. If anybody can achieve this, he'll surely win the Noble Prize.
I always assumed probably wrongly that a B-E condensate was when groups of atoms dropped to an energy state that allowed them to act like one very large and coordinated atom. Would not thermodynamics keep in a system like a B-E this organization from occurring at temps that much higher than zero kelvin, forces like vanderwahls and electro weak forces. or if some physisististist care to enlighten a mathematical wannabee
"Magnons are the quanta of magnetic excitations in a magnetically ordered ensemble of magnetic moments."
This statement caused my bogometer to break. Now the needle is stuck all the way right at WTF.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
If they are true BECs, these experiments are the first evidence of them in the solid state.
Bah real physicists start the day with a nice large glass of Bose-Einstein Condensate (Now with Calcium)
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Carter: "Well how do *you* think it's done".
Oneil: "Magnets."
I was noticing it was pretty hot this afternoon. I guess Einsteins beer was left in the sun too long, and even though it was warm, condensation still formed on its bottle.
A pretty amazing scientific phenomenon alright!
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
By the way "magenets" and "Enslisigh" were not put there on purpose, out of any sense of irony. They are there because I can't write sensible English. I might give Enslisigh a try though....
"We gave the word mob a bad name!"
This has very little to do with your comment, but the L.A. Times recently published an article regarding the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit that focused on their fight against child pornography ("Sifting Clues to an Unsmiling Girl"). They are the law enforcement organization that photoshopped the victims out of child porn photos in order to get the public's assistance in identifying the backgrounds (it worked). In any case, the article had this amazing claim:
Wow. All but one in four years. Seemed rather unlikely to me.
So, I called the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit and spoke to Det. Ian Lamond, who was familiar with the Times article. He claims they were misquoted, or if that figure was given it was done so jokingly. Of course, even if the figure was given jokingly, shouldn't the Times reporter have clarified something that seems rather odd? Shouldn't her editors have questioned her sources?
Nevertheless, Det. Lamond does confirm that a majority of those arrested show "at least a passing interest in Star Trek, if not a strong interest." They've arrested well over one hundred people over the past four years and they can gauge this interest in Star Trek by the arrestees' "paraphenalia, books, videotapes and DVDs."
I asked Det. Lamond if this wasn't simply a general interest in science fiction and fantasy, such as Star Wars or Harry Potter or similar. Paraphrasing his answer, he said, while there was sometimes other science fiction and fantasy paraphenalia, Star Trek was the most consistent and when he referred to a majority of the arrestees being Star Trek fans, it was Star Trek-specific.
Someone understood that?
it's the only way to lose an English major in an English sentence.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
A BEC at room temperature would provide for macroscopic quantum phenomenon.
BECs are the fifth state of matter. If you could induce an object to exist in a state like a BEC, you'd experience some rather magical possibilities.
When the DeBroglie wavelength exceeds the molecular mean spacing, the atoms become a BEC. This is when all the quantum wave functions of the atoms exist in the same stage, so a million atoms equals the same as one. This is only possible with bosons, so their electrons can exist in the same energy states (integer spin values, unlike fermions).
So basically, if the atoms exist in the same quantum wave function the conductivity increases a trillion-fold, the BEC will start to crawl up the sides of containers exihibiting anti-gravity, and the entire thing will weigh as much as one individual atom.
Therefore, it's hypothesized that if regular objects could exist as BEC, you could drop that object through a table (exhibiting aspects of quantum tunneling), you could make glass superconduct, and thus supersede the laws of thermodynamics, revolutionzing the world with unlimited energy, ridding our dependence on fragmented energies, and otherwise institute world peace.
Of course, it's impossible.
This bodes poorly for the release of the playstation 3, then.
Why do I get the feeling that a warm BEC is right up there with Cold Fusion?
I have a Ph.D. in biology, and I am interested in current research in many other fields as well. That said, I have no idea WTF the *significance* of the current breakthrough is. What does it mean? Why isn't there even a one sentence half-assed attempt in the summary? Thanks for the wiki-link. If I wanted to seriously brush up while trying to navigate the ridiculous wiki, I'd go there. Seriously, most people might just want to know why they should give a shit that BE condensation has been observed at solid-state. Don't get me wrong, I think there is something fascinating in all this, just wish the summary would have pointed to that aspect instead of regurgitating the so-called claimes of a breakthrough.
"Magnons are the quanta of magnetic excitations in a magnetically ordered ensemble of magnetic moments."
You have used up your stockpile of confounding-words-that-begin-with-an-M today! Please come again!
Seriously, I had no idea Slashdot articles could be this far above my head.
Slashdot started off as a strongly science/tech-oriented discussion site, and articles that required detailed knowledge of the subject matter were common in those early days (I have a 4-digit Slashdot ID so this is first-hand).
But popularity brought in a broader cross-section of the population, and deep science and engineering knowledge is rare in the population at large. The fact that nowadays the majority of Slashdot articles are merely rehashes of some non-technical person's blog is just the editors keeping in tune with their majority audience. It's sad, but inevitable.
Umm, aren't the photons in a laser at least partly in a BEC? And, just to be clear about this, it's a condensate with stable particles, at room temperature, yadda, yadda.
I am getting so sick of hearing people talk about a hole as if it was a particle. A hole, at least in the semiconductor sense, is where an electron should be in a valence crystaline lattice (I know I'm saying it badly, but if you know what I'm talking about, you'll know what I meant).
So this "Polarion" is said to be an electron-hole pair. You know what an electron + a lack of an electron is? AN ELECTRON. Oy.... Every time I bring this up, some other EE (yes, I am an EE) always says that, yes a hole can move and has a positive charge... No... an electron moves, causing a hole to appear somewhere. A hole has no charge, thus 1e difference from an electron. If it had the +1e everbody keeps saying, then it would be a 2e differnce between. And anyway, why talk about it having charge? It doesn't exist, therefore it cannot have charge.
Many may think I'm crazy, but a hole doesn't exist. It's very concept even being possible, because of something NOT being where it is said to be. It's existence is based off of something not existing (in the right place), I guess.
But yeah, is there some special property of holes that make them a particle that everybody keeps talking about? I just don't understand how they call something an electron-hole pair, and say that it isn't just an electron.
...Bose-Einstein Condensate all over her face. Boy, was she cold after!
> Just in case you need a brush up on BEC, like I did, check out the Wikipedia article on Bose-Einstein condensation
Ok, IANAP, but I thought the BEC was the result of supercooling atoms until their temperature, and hence momentum, was virtually 0. Because of quantum conjugate pairs, their position's uncertainty therefore must skyrocket. This bizarre, near-macroscopic "thing" was the "condensate". That Wikipedia article mentions none of this. Am I even more clueless than I already know I am, or is the article just poorly written, like a computer reference manual, only useful to people who know the subject backwards and forwards?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Oops, seemingly-minor correction, but in the 2nd paragraph I should have said : "A mode will oscillate at a specific frequency, however. If you write the 'equations of motion' for all atoms in the crystal in 'matrix' form, the modes would correspond to the 'eigenvectors' of that matrix."
Eigenvalues are scalars, eigenvectors are vectors. In this case the eigenvectors would describe the motion of each of the atoms in the crystal.
make world, not war
I really appreciated the information. My dad always taught me to hang out with people smarter than me, because that would make me smarter in the long run. He taught me to never be afraid to "look something up". That's probably why people understand what I say just about as much as people understand your topic. It was great information, and I followed it well. Glad to have you on board.
Slashdot started off as a strongly science/tech-oriented discussion site, and articles that required detailed knowledge of the subject matter were common in those early days (I have a 4-digit Slashdot ID so this is first-hand).
I remember this too.
I've been posting on Slashdot since before they had these newfangled "user accounts". I didn't see the need for them then, and I don't now: that's why I post as an AC.
Interestingly, shortly after the user accounts were created, I found this cool new user who posted a lot of wierd things, but some very, very smart things as well. His name was "Anonymous Coward". Over time, the number of kids arguing with PhDs over their field of expertise tended to weed out the experts on slashdot, and now it's mostly just 15 yr old kids, and a few cranky old holdouts like me.
Could it be that Quantum coherence of quasiparticles at room temps has the potential to explain the phenomenon of consciousness, as proposed by Penrose, Hameroff and others (www.quantumconsciousness.org/ and also the movie What The *bleep* Do We Know)