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Low-temperature physics

Low-temperature physics

Coldest: how a letter to Einstein and advances in laser-cooling technology led physicists to new quantum states of matter

02 Jan 2024

The road to Bose–Einstein condensates and degenerate Fermi gases was paved with ideas that shouldn’t have worked, but did, as Chad Orzel explains in the final segment of his three-part history of laser cooling. Read part one and part two first

A Bose–Einstein condensate emerges from a cloud of cold rubidium atoms
The coolest result In this now-iconic series of images taken in the summer of 1995, a Bose–Einstein condensate emerges from a cloud of cold rubidium atoms in Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman’s laboratory. The “spike” in the density of atoms at the centre of the cloud is a sign that many atoms there are occupying the same quantum state – the signature of Bose–Einstein condensation. (Courtesy: NIST/JILA/CU-Boulder)
During the last two decades of the 20th century, atomic physicists repeatedly broke the record for t

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Chad Orzel is a popular-science author and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in the US.  He has a PhD in chemical physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he studied laser cooling at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the lab of Bill Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics
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