Physicists working under Sebastian Weyl have just made the announcement condition Scientific paper published in the journal natureThey were able to create a Bose-Einstein condenser consisting not only of atoms, but also of molecules.
To achieve this feat, the scientists had to cool the molecules they were studying, which consist of sodium and cesium atoms, to an extremely low temperature of 5 nanokelvin. It is worth paying attention to the fact that these molecules are polar, so they have both a positive and negative electrical charge. This in turn means that their interactions with the environment are very interesting and also worth studying in the case of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC).
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Scientists believe that matter in this unusual state of matter opens the way to investigate the reality around us in a completely new way. On the one hand, a Bose-Einstein condenser allows you to study and test the fundamental laws of physics, and on the other hand, it can contribute to the creation of advanced quantum simulations.
How to cool particles to 5 nanokelvin?
The researchers point out that microwave radiation was used to achieve the BEC state, which is able to create specific shields around each particle. In a sample where each molecule has such a shield, only the hottest molecules can be removed from the sample. As more of it is removed, the temperature of the remaining portion of the sample decreases.
Researchers are at this stage already in 2023. However, it was only the introduction of the second microwave field that increased the efficiency of the cooling process, which eventually made it possible to create a Bose-Einstein condenser from molecules consisting of cesium and sodium. Furthermore, this sample remained in the BEC state for more than 2 seconds, which is a really long time in this system.
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Scientists point out that the second microwave field, in addition to increasing the sample cooling rate, allows controlling the orientation of the molecules and thus their behavior towards each other. There are many indications that this may soon enable the creation of new quantum states. Currently, researchers are focusing on theoretically describing the interactions that occur between molecules in a BEC sample. This is a very broad area of research, since there are many predictions about the behavior of polar molecules in the BEC state. Now it is finally possible to verify them experimentally.
Moreover, most interactions between molecules last less than a second, sometimes even milliseconds. Given that the BEC created by scientists exists for more than two seconds, scientists have the opportunity to study many processes occurring in this unusual state of matter.
So it’s possible that scientists from Colombia have just opened a whole new window on reality. Once again, man looks behind the scenes of reality and gets to know the world around him anew.
