The Ketterle Group
is working with lasers to create superfluids at MIT. Pictured, from left to
right:
grad student Colin
Kenned, Professor Wolfgang Ketterle, grad student William Cody Burton,
and grad student
Woo Chang Chung. Photo: Bryce Vickmark
MIT team creates a superfluid in a record-high magnetic
field.
(August 10, 2015) MIT
physicists have created a superfluid gas, the so-called Bose-Einstein
condensate, for the first time in an extremely high magnetic field. The
magnetic field is a synthetic magnetic field, generated using laser beams, and
is 100 times stronger than that of the world’s strongest magnets. Within this
magnetic field, the researchers could keep a gas superfluid for a tenth of a
second — just long enough for the team to observe it. The researchers report
their results this week in the journal Nature Physics.
A superfluid is a phase of matter that only certain liquids
or gases can assume, if they are cooled to extremely low temperatures. At
temperatures approaching absolute zero, atoms cease their individual, energetic
trajectories, and start to move collectively as one wave.
Superfluids are thought to flow endlessly, without losing
energy, similar to electrons in a superconductor. Observing the behavior of
superfluids therefore may help scientists improve the quality of
superconducting magnets and sensors, and develop energy-efficient methods for
transporting electricity.
But superfluids are temperamental, and can disappear in a
flash if atoms cannot be kept cold or confined. The MIT team combined several
techniques in generating ultracold temperatures, to create and maintain a
superfluid gas long enough to observe it at ultrahigh synthetic magnetic
fields.
“Going to extremes is the way to make discoveries,” says
team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at
MIT. “We use ultracold atoms to map out and understand the behavior of
materials which have not yet been created. In this sense, we are ahead of
nature.”
Ketterle’s team members include graduate students Colin
Kennedy, William Cody Burton, and Woo Chang Chung.