How Cool are Quantum Opticians?
It’s official: a physicist’s laboratory is the coldest place in the universe. Physicists and physical chemists are finding that having the coldest place in the universe is becoming increasingly useful. Small collections of atoms or ions cooled to ultra-low temperatures provide the ideal laboratory for a wide variety of applications, including the study of fundamental physics, the development of sensors and ultra-precise time clocks and possibly the development of a future generation of supercomputers. Bose-Einstein condensation describes the collapse of the atoms into a single quantum state. This phenomenon was predicted in the 1920’s, and derived originally from Satyendra Bose’s work on the statistical mechanics of photons, and subsequently formalized by Albert Einstein. Governed by the Bose-Einstein statistics, a Bose gas describes the statistical distribution of certain types of identical particles known as bosons. “Bosonic particles”, are allowed to share quantum states with each o
