University of Amsterdam physicists build an atom laser that can stay on forever. Credit: UvA
These days, imagining our everyday life without lasers is difficult. Lasers are used in printers, CD players, measuring devices, pointers, and so on.
What makes lasers so special is that they use coherent waves of light: all the light inside a laser vibrates completely in sync. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics tells us that particles like atoms should also be thought of as waves. As a result, we can build ‘
The central part of the experiment in which the coherent matter waves are created. Fresh atoms (blue) fall in and make their way to the Bose-Einstein Condensate in the center. In reality, the atoms are not visible to the naked eye. Image processing by Scixel. Credit: UvA
In everyday life, we are not at all familiar with these condensates. The reason: it is very difficult to get atoms to all behave as one. The culprit destroying the synchronicity is temperature: when a substance heats up, the constituent particles start to jiggle around, and it becomes virtually impossible to get them to behave as one. Only at extremely low temperatures, about a millionth of a degree above
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