The 5th state of matter,

Bose–Einstein condensate

Done by: Jeremy Teo (14) 1O2

Background
 In our daily experience, most of us deal with three
phases of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.
 A fourth, high-energy phase of matter, plasma, occurs in
high energy processes as near as a fire or as far away as
the core of a star.
 For decades, the existence of a fifth, low-energy form of
matter, known as Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs), was
only a theoretical possibility.
 In 2001, the Nobel Prize for Physics went to Eric
Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl Wieman, who used
lasers, magnets, and evaporative cooling to bring about
this fascinating new phase of matter.
What is Bose–Einstein condensate?
 BECs have strange properties with many possible
applications in future technologies. They can slow light
down to the residential speed limit, flow without friction,
and demonstrate the weirdest elements of quantum
mechanics on a scale anyone can see.
 They are effectively super atoms, groups of atoms that
behave as one.
The founders
 The theory of BECs was developed by Satyendra Nath Bose
and Albert Einstein in the early 1920s.
 Bose combined his work in thermodynamics and statistical
mechanics with the quantum mechanical theories that were
being developed, and Einstein carried the work to its natural
conclusions and brought it to the public eye.
 At the time, none of the necessary technology was available to
make BECs in the lab: cryonics were extremely limited, and
the first laser wasn't even built until 1960. The fine control
allowed by modern computers was also a prerequisite.
Because of all of these technological hurdles, it wasn't until
1995 that experimenters were able to force rubidium atoms
to form this type of condensate.
BECs as compared to the other states of
matter
 Solids have the lowest energy levels (corresponding with
the lowest temperatures), while liquids and gases have
increasingly higher levels. At the top end of this scale, we
can add plasmas, which are energetic enough to emit all
kinds of energy in the form of heat and photons.
 Bose-Einstein Condensates represent a fifth phase of
matter beyond solids. They are less energetic than solids.
We can also think of this as more organized than solids,
or as colder -- BECs occur in the fractional micro-Kelvin
range, less than millionths of a degree above absolute
zero; in contrast, the vacuum of interstellar space
averages a positively tropical 3 K.
 BECs are more ordered than solids in that their
restrictions occur not on the molecular level but on the
atomic level.
 Atoms in a solid are locked into roughly the same
location in regard to the other atoms in the area.
 Atoms in a BEC are locked into all of the same attributes
as each other; they are literally indistinguishable, in the
same location and with the same attributes.
 When a BEC is visible, each part that one can see is the
sum of portions of each atom, all behaving in the same
way, rather than being the sum of atoms as in the other
phases of matter.
Wave functions and Quantum Spin

 Each atom has a wave function that describes its

behaviour as a wave. This wave function can be used to
determine the probabilities that the atom will be in a
given place or have a certain momentum or other useful
properties.
 Each particle can also be determined to have a spin.
While many physics terms mean something other than
their everyday usage, "spin" seems to be a behaviour that
acts just as if the particle is spinning around an axis.
 The amount of spin a particle can have depends on the
type of particle. Fermions (like electrons) can have spin
values that are +/- 1/2, +/- 3/2, +/- 5/2, etc.; bosons (like
some isotopes of hydrogen and helium) have spin values
that are whole numbers.
 Fermions obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
 Bosons do not.
 Bosons and fermions can both be composite particles;
they don't have to be "indivisible" particles. The same
physics will hold for bosons such as photons and K
mesons as will hold for hydrogen and helium atoms, as
long as the atoms are close to their ground state.
The Pauli Exclusion Principle
 The Pauli Exclusion Principle (which was determined
experimentally) states that no two fermion particles can
occupy the same state at the same time.
 They must have some way of being distinguished,
whether by location, spin state, or some other property.
That means that if one fermion is in a local ground or
minimum energy state, the next fermion in the area must
be in a higher energy state.
 For bosons, however, the Pauli Exclusion Principle is
irrelevant by definition -- so all of the bosons can be in
the same state at the same time.
 When this happens, a BEC is formed.
Creating a condensate
 Because of the specialized conditions under which they
can exist, Bose-Einstein Condensates have only been
created in laboratories.
 First, an experimenter takes bosons that have been
purified of other elements and puts them in a vacuum.
Popular choices for these bosons include specific
isotopes of atoms of helium, sodium, rubidium, and
hydrogen.
 Not all isotopes are bosons, and only bosons can form a
BEC. The initial method of making a rubidium condensate
is the most straightforward, and further methods have
been refinements of the same general principles of
cooling.
 The atoms are first cooled to fractions of a degree
Kelvin. They need to be virtually motionless in order to
stay in the BEC ground state. Then they are put into a
magnetic trap, keeping them in a limited area.
 The magnetic trap is arranged with eight magnets in what
is known as a quadruple configuration. The magnets we
are most familiar with in daily life are dipole magnets: a
two-ended field of magnetization with one polarity at one
end and the opposite polarity at the other end. A
quadruple configuration looks more like a plus sign, with
the opposing points having the same polarity.
 When the atoms are in a quadruple magnetic trap, the way
they interact is primarily through their spin; higher order
considerations such as magneto static interactions are limited
by the trap. A laser with a precisely calculated wavelength
shines on the atoms, and as the light scatters off the atoms, it
takes with it more energy than it brought into the process.
 The Doppler shift from the higher energy atoms is calculated
so that they "see" the laser of the right color, and the atoms
that are already lower energy stay unexcited. The energy state
of the atoms is, of course, directly related to how quickly they
are moving, so the first wavelength used is selected for the
fastest atoms present.
 The laser's wavelength must be very precisely tuned to the
atom. One of the hardest problems physicists face in making
BECs is keeping the laser tuned to the right frequency despite
outside interference; even a car passing by on the road
outside a lab may cause enough vibration to knock the laser
out of its desired frequency.
 To make things worse, as the average speed of the atoms
decreases and their energy level goes down, the desired
Doppler shift changes, so the laser must be retuned to match
the new "high" energy atoms. In order to account for motion
from all directions, the lasers shine in on the atoms from
opposite points on all three axes. Furthermore, the magnetic
trap is combined with an optical trap that pushes atoms back
towards the centre if they stray too far. This laser set-up is
known as "optical molasses."
 The atoms are then cooled further through what is
known as evaporative cooling. Essentially, evaporative
cooling allows the faster, more energetic atoms to escape
from the trap, leaving only the slowest, coolest, least
energetic atoms behind.
 When the atoms get to the point where only ground
state atoms are left, they coalesce into a Bose-Einstein
Condensate, which behaves like a super atom.
Properties and future applications
 Most research into Bose-Einstein Condensates serves as
"basic" research -- that is to say, it is more concerned with
knowing more about the world in general than with
implementing a specific technology. However, there are
several potential uses for BECs. The most promising
application is in etching.
 When BECs are fashioned into a beam, they are like a laser in
their coherence. That is to say, both a laser and a BEC beam
run "in lock step," guaranteeing that an experimenter can
know how a part of the beam will behave at every single
location. This property of lasers has been used in the past for
etching purposes. A BEC beam would have greater precision
and energy than a laser because even at their low kinetic
energy state, the massive particles would be more energetic
than the massless photons.
 The major technological concerns with a BEC beam
would be getting a clean enough environment for it to
function repeatedly and reducing the cost of BEC
creation enough to use BECs regularly in beams.
However, BEC beams or "atom lasers" could produce
precisely trimmed objects down to a very small scale --
possibly a nanotech scale. Their practical limits will be
found with experimentation.
 In some ways, the atom laser works as the opposite of a
laser. A laser can produce more photons from the atoms
at hand, but an atom laser can only deal with the number
of atoms it starts with.
 Rather than being knocked into an excited state, as
atoms that emit laser photons are, BEC atoms are cooled
down to the ground state.
 Unlike a laser beam, an atom laser beam could not travel
far through air and would fall due to gravity. However,
these differences can be calculated and accounted for in
the future uses of the atom laser.
 One of the most commonly known properties of BECs is
their super fluidity. That is to say, BECs flow without
interior friction.
 Since they're effectively super atoms, BECs are all moving
in the same way at the same time when they flow, and
don't have energy losses due to friction.
 Even the best lubricants currently available have some
frictional losses as their molecules interact with each
other, but BECs, while terribly expensive, would pose no
such problem.
 One of the problems physicists run into when teaching
quantum mechanics is that the principles are just
counter-intuitive.
 They're hard to visualize.
 But videos of BEC blobs several millimetres across show
wave-particle duality at a level we can comprehend easily.
 We can watch something that acts like an atom, at a size
we could hold in our hands.
 MIT researchers have produced visible interference fringe
patterns from sodium BECs, demonstrating quantum
mechanics effects on the macro scale.
 Perhaps most interestingly, BECs have been used to slow
the speed of light to a crawl -- from 186,282 miles per
second (3x108 m/s) in a vacuum to 38 miles per hour
(17 m/s) in a sodium BEC.
 No other substance so far has been able to slow the
speed of light within orders of magnitude of that speed.
 Although so far this discovery has not been applied to
any technological problems, researchers at Harvard
suggest that it might make possible revolutions in
communications, including possibly a single-photon
switch.
 The Bose-Einstein Condensate is to matter as the laser is
to light -- the analogy is precisely that simple.
 It took twenty years from the invention of the laser until
its technological applications began to take off.
 At first, lasers were considered too difficult to make to
ever find use in everyday applications; now, they're
everywhere.
 The characteristics of BECs, specifically their response to
sound and other disturbances, are still under
investigation, but they hold the promise of many curious
developments to come.
References
 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_5th_6th_7th_state
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condens
 http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011210/bose-einstein
 http://www.google.com.sg/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
Thank you for all your attention!