Bose-Einstein Condensates Display Their First Tricks

摘要

A year ago this month, physicists finally realized what for decades had seemed at best a dream, if not a fantasy. On 5 June last year, a team at the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards arid Technology (NIST) in Boulder created a new state of matter: a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which a cloud of atoms is cooled socloseto absolute zero that their quantum-mechanical waves merge (Science, 14 July 1995, pp. 152, 182, and 198). In effect, the atoms act like a single macroscopic particle--one that still obeys the microscopic laws of quantum physics. But with barely 1000 atoms in a condensate that lasted just a few seconds, the Colorado team could do no more than say they'd done it.