Whoa, whoa,! This is a nexus point. A zone where multi-verse union is cognizable, the thesi holding this is not supposed to be. We can develop models of interface of, eventually, many facets of reality, of dimensionality. We're broaching simultaneity here.
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Researchers have coaxed a group of molecules into a weird type of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. The achievement gives physicists a powerful new tool for investigating phenomena such as superconductivity.
This is the first BEC made from molecules, rather than atoms. Of several groups trying to pull it off over the past few months, Rudolf Grimm of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and his colleagues are the first to publish their findings1.
"This is going to cause quite a lot of excitement - we've all been racing to make a BEC from molecules," says BEC researcher Randall Hulet of Rice University in Houston, Texas. "The doors have been opened to some deep understandings".
A BEC is a group of identical particles that behaves as if it were one particle. Physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted the existence of such an entity in 1924. The first BEC was made in 1995 with rubidium atoms.
BECs are superconducting and superfluid - they transmit electricity without resistance and flow without friction. The condensates arise only when particles have very low energy, at temperatures a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
Pairing up
Molecules, being more complex than atoms, are harder to get into the same state. They bump and jostle, raising the temperature.
Grimm's team used lasers to cool a gas cloud of lithium atoms. As the temperature fell, the atoms formed weak chemical bonds, pairing up into lithium molecules. In this state, the gas was stable enough to form a BEC.
The molecular condensate contained 150,000 lithium molecules and lasted 20 seconds. Most BECs exist for just milliseconds. "To get molecules living in a condensate for that long is amazing," says Deborah Jin of the University of Colorado in Boulder. Her group posted a paper online last Friday, describing their manufacture of a fleeting BEC from potassium molecules2.
The molecular BEC is "a toy system for understanding basic physics", says Grimm. Most superconductors, for example, are more complex materials whose properties are hard to understand.
What's the matter
The molecular lithium condensate is also a step towards another physics grail: a hitherto unseen state of matter called the fermionic condensate.
Lithium atoms belong to a class of particle called fermions. This means that they cannot exist in the same physical state as one another - the exact opposite of what happens in a BEC. When the atoms become molecules, they cross into another class of particle, bosons, which coexist comfortably.
A lithium condensate occupies the border between these states. Some of the molecules within it can split up, back into fermionic atoms. These can form pairs that are superconducting, but not condensed.
A fermionic condensate could be used to study fundamental particles - electrons, neutrons and protons are also fermions - as well as quantum computing and neutron stars, the super-dense leftovers of stellar explosions.
"It's a wonderful time to be working in this field," says physicist Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. "It's competitive, full of excitement, and the pace of progress is stunning." Ketterle won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on BECs.
References
Jochim, S. et al. Bose-Einstein condensation of molecules. Science, published online, (2003).
Greiner, M., Regal, C. A. & Jin, D. S.. A molecular Bose-Einstein condensate emerges from a Fermi sea. Preprint, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0311172 (2003).
© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003
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