| When the other
half gets really cold
Four years after
the creation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate—an odd form of
ultracold matter composed of atoms called bosons—physicists have
cooled fermions, the other type of atoms, sufficiently to make their
quantum mechanical nature apparent.
References:
DeMarco, B., and
D.S. Jin. 1999. Onset of Fermi degeneracy in a trapped atomic gas. Science
285(Sept. 10):1703.
Further Readings:
Weiss, P. 1999.
Fountains of time. Science News 156(Aug. 7):92.
Wu, C. 1995.
Physics ‘Holy Grail’ finally captured. Science News 148(July
15):36.
Sources:
Brian DeMarco
University of Colorado at Boulder
Physics Department
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Boulder, CO 80309-0440
Randall Hulet
Rice University
Physics Department
Mailstop Code 61
Houston, TX 77251
Deborah S. Jin
University of Colorado at Boulder
Quantum Physics Division
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Boulder, CO 80309-0440
Daniel Kleppner
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room 26-237
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
From Science
News, Vol. 156, No. 11, September 11, 1999, p. 166. Copyright ©
1999, Science Service. |