Tag Archives: Bose-Einstein condensate
A tribute to rubidium
And to Paul Feyerabend Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Scicomm, Uncategorized
Tagged atomic clocks, Bose-Einstein condensate, condensed matter physics, materials science, Paul Feyerabend, rubidium, spectral lines
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A new kind of quantum engine with ultracold atoms
In conventional ‘macroscopic’ engines like the ones that guzzle fossil fuels to power cars and motorcycles, the fuels are set ablaze to release heat, which is converted to mechanical energy and transferred to the vehicle’s moving parts. In order to … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged adiabatic compression, adiabatic expansion, Bose gas, Bose-Einstein condensate, Fermi gas, internal combustion engine, Otto cycle, Pauli energy, quantum engine, quantum thermodynamics, thermodynamic efficiency
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Chasing solitons
Every once in a while, I dive into a topic in science for no reason other than that I find it interesting. This is how I learnt about Titan, laser-cooling, and random walks. This post is about the fourth topic … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged Akhmediev breather, Bose-Einstein condensate, breather soliton, David Tong, Draupner wave, Erwin Schrodinger, fluid dynamics, Froude number, guitar string, Howell Peregrine, John Scott Russell, Kelvin wake, Korteweg-de Vries equation, Kuznetsov-Ma breather, nonlinearity, partial differential equations, Peregrine soliton, sine-Gordon breather, solitons, wave of translation
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A giant leap closer to the continuous atom laser
Physicists have created a steady-state Bose-Einstein condensate – a long-sought feat that opens the door to a variety of applications, including in holography and quantum computing. Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged atom laser, Bose stimulation, Bose-Einstein condensate, laser cooling, matter-wave, phase coherence, spatial coherence, University of Amsterdam, Wolfgang Ketterle
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The awesome limits of superconductors
On June 24, a press release from CERN said that scientists and engineers working on upgrading the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had “built and operated … the most powerful electrical transmission line … to date”. The transmission line consisted of … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged Abrikosov vortex lattice, Abrikosov vortices, BCS theory, Bose-Einstein condensate, CERN, Cooper pairs, copper, electrical conductivity, electrical resistivity, electrons, flux-flow resistance, Joule heating, Large Hadron Collider, Lisa Randall, magnesium diboride, magnetic flux, Meissner effect, niobium, Pauli's exclusion principle, Praveen Chaddah, protons, silver, superconductors, superfluid helium, titanium, type I superconductors, type II superconductors, vortex pinning
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Where is the coolest lab in the universe?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performs an impressive feat every time it accelerates billions of protons to nearly the speed of light – and not in terms of the energy alone. For example, you release more energy when you clap … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged blue hypergiant, Boomerang Nebula, Bose-Einstein condensate, cosmic microwave background, energy density, Eta Carinae, gas outflow, heat, International Space Station, kinetic energy, Large Hadron Collider, Nature News, red giant, temperature, thermal equilibrium, thermodynamics, vacuum, Vladivostok, white dwarf, Wolfgang Ketterle
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When cooling down really means slowing down
Consider this post the latest in a loosely defined series about atomic cooling techniques that I’ve been writing since June 2018. Atoms can’t run a temperature, but things made up of atoms, like a chair or table, can become hotter … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged Albert Einstein, atomic cooling, atomic trap, Bose-Einstein condensate, Bose-Einstein statistics, Carl Wieman, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, collisional cooling, diatomic molecules, Eric Cornell, Harvard University, laser cooling, Massachusetts Institute of Technoogy, NaLi, niobium nitride, quantum chemistry, quantum computing, S Pancharatnam, Satyendra Nath Bose, Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam, Sisyphus cooling, spin polarization, superconductors, superfluids, University of Waterloo, Wolfgang Ketterle
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Atoms within atoms
It’s a matter of some irony that forces that act across larger distances also give rise to lots of empty space – although the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The force of gravity, for example, … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged Bose-Einstein condensate, bosonic gas, electrons, integer spin, inverse square law, laser excitation, neutrons, Rydberg atom, Rydberg polaron, Serge Haroche, strontium, subatomic particles, subatomic physics, valence electrons
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The science in Netflix’s ‘Spectral’
It’s fun to think about the implications of a film’s antagonists being modelled after a phenomenon I’ve often read/written about but never thought about that way. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Albert Einstein, BCS theory, Bose-Einstein condensate, ceramics, Cooper pair, DARPA, electromagnetic radiation, M1 Abrams tank, Netflix, Quantum mechanics, refractive index, SN Bose, Spectral, superconductivity, superfluidity, UV light, warcraft, wavefunction
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Relativity’s kin, the Bose-Einstein condensate, is 90 now
The BEC was Einstein’s last major prediction and it took a revolution in quantum optics to be realised. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Bose-Einstein condensate, laser cooling, magnetic traps, quantum entanglement, Quantum mechanics, Satyendra Nath Bose, Wolfgang Ketterle
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