Two corrections, first a minor one then a major one:
-
The first experiment to see a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)
in atomic matter was not at MIT but in JILA at the
University of Colorado at Boulder by Eric Cornell and
Carl Wieman and their group. See
http://jilawww.colorado.edu/bec/ for the press release
and a list of their publications. I believe the key
reference is: "Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor," M.H. Anderson, J.R. Ensher, M.R. Matthews, C.E. Wieman, and E.A. Cornell, Science 269, 198 (1995). The MIT group published
results of their BEC observation four months later in
"Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of sodium atoms,"
K. B. Davis, M.-O. Mewes, M. R. Andrews, N. J. van Druten, D. S. Durfee, D. M. Kurn, and W. Ketterle,
Physical Review Letters, 75, 3969 (1995).
- (Responding to a now-deleted write-up which wrote that
a quark-gluon plasma was an example of a Bose-Einstein condensate, I
wrote the following...)
The quark-gluon plasma is not even remotely a
Bose-Einstein condensate, nor is the normal confined
phase of hadrons a Bose-Einstein condensate.
Quarks are fermions, not bosons.
It is posited that
at high temperatures (not energies) quark
matter undergoes a phase transition from the normally
confined hadronic phase, quarks confined to be
in bound states like the proton, neutron or pion,
to a phase where quarks and their force carriers,
the gluons, are deconfined and are a gas of
free particles. Since quarks are fermions
and have spin angular momentum equal to 1/2, they
obey Fermi-Dirac statistics, not Bose-Einstein statistics.
Futhermore, the existence of the quark-gluon plasma
has yet to be seen experimentally. Hints have been
seen at CERN, the collider facility in Geneva, but
we now await a signal at the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider or RHIC on Long Island, NY.
Node what you know. This concludes this rant.
Update: Eric Cornell (JILA/Colorado/NIST),
Carl Wieman(JILA/Colorado),
and Wolfgang Ketterle (MIT)
were awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics
for their creation of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in
the laboratory. A short article chronicling the JILA and MIT
efforts to create the BEC appears in the December 2001 issue
of Physics Today.