A new breakthrough has allowed physicists to create a beam of atoms that behaves like a laser, and could theoretically last “forever.”
This may mean that the technology is on the way to practical use, although important limitations still apply.
‘Missing Link’ Find By Physicists That Could Provide Quantum Internet Technology
Topic: Physicists Have Claimed That They’ve Built an Atom Laser That Can Run ‘Forever’
Nevertheless, it is a giant step forward in what is known as an “atom laser”—a beam made of atoms that march as a single wave—that will one day be a technology of fundamental physical consistency, and engineering precision.
can be used to test Atom lasers have been firing for a minute. The first atom laser was built in 1996 by a team of physicists at MIT.
The concept seems simple: just as a conventional light-based laser consists of photons that are synchronous with their own wavelengths, a laser made of atoms needs its own wavelength.
-Like nature to align before changing as a beam. As with many things in science, however, it is easier than imagined. At the core of the atom laser is a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. A BEC is created by cooling a cloud of bosons to just a fraction of absolute zero.
At such low temperatures, iotas sink to their least conceivable energy state ceaselessly totally.
At the point when they arrive at these lower energies, the quantum properties of the particles can never again disrupt one another.
They get close enough to each other to overlap, resulting in a high-density cloud of atoms that behaves like a ‘superatom’ or wave of matter. However, BECs are something of a paradox. They are very fragile; Light can also destroy a BEC.
Given that the atoms in a BEC are cooled using optical lasers, this usually means that the existence of a BEC is transient. The atom lasers scientists have been able to achieve to date have been pulsed rather than continuous. And only one pulse off is involved before a new BEC needs to be generated.
To make a nonstop BEC, a group of scientists from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands understood that something expected to change.
“In past analyses, the molecules were cooled continuously in one spot.
In our setup, we decided to extend the cooling steps not in time but in space: we move the atoms as they cool continuously. go through the stages of”. Physicist Florian Schreck explained. “Finally, the ultracold atoms reach the center of the experiment, where they can be used to create coherent matter waves in the BEC.
But while these atoms are being used, new atoms are already on their way to fill the BEC. on. That way, we can continue the process — basically forever.” That ‘heart of the experiment’ is a trap that protects the BEC from light, a reservoir that can be continuously replenished as long as the experiment runs.
Shielding the BEC from the light generated by the cooling laser, however, while simple in theory, was again somewhat more difficult in practice. There were not only technical hurdles but also bureaucratic and administrative hurdles.
“After moving to Amsterdam in 2013, we took a leap of faith, borrowed funds, a spare room, and funded a team entirely with private grants,” said Chun Chia Chen, a physicist who led the research. Started with.”
“After six years, in the early long stretches of Christmas morning 2019, the trial was at last while heading to work.
We had the idea to add an extra laser beam to solve one last technical difficulty, and immediately we Every picture taken showed a BEC. The first continuous wave BEC.”
Now that the first part of the continuous atom laser — the “continuous atom” part — has been realized — the next step, the team said, is working on maintaining a stable atom beam. They can achieve this by moving atoms into a porous state, thereby emitting a propagating matter wave.
Because they used strontium atoms, a popular choice for BECs, this possibility opens up interesting possibilities, he said. Atomic interferometry using strontium BECs can be used, for example, to investigate relativity and quantum mechanics, or to detect gravitational waves.
“Our examination is a matter-wave simple of a ceaseless wave optical laser with a completely intelligent pit reflect,” the specialists wrote in their paper.
“This verification of-rule gives a new, until now lacking part of iota optics, empowering the development of ceaselessly reasonable matter-wave gadgets.”
