An exquisite example of cross border scientific alliance
When the greatest scientists in history collaborated across borders, they made breakthroughs in research and shared ideas, that helped them advance their own research and make valuable contributions to society as a whole.
The coldest place in the Universe is in advanced physics laboratories, where sophisticated optical cooling techniques are used to produce ultra-cold groups of atoms known as Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) that behave like single wave-like entities, a ‘super atom’ as it were.
Satyendra Nath Bose, renowned Indian mathematician and physicist specializing in theoretical physics, best known for his work on quantum mechanics, sent a paper to Albert Einstein, world-famous theoretical physicist, on the quantum statistics of light quanta (now called photons), in which he derived Planck’s quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics.
Albert Einstein was so impressed that he translated the paper from English to German and submitted it for Bose to the Zeitschrift für Physik, which published it in 1924. Einstein then extended Bose’s ideas to matter in two other papers. The result of their efforts is the concept of a Bose gas, governed by Bose–Einstein statistics, which describes the statistical distribution of identical particles with integer spin, now called bosons.
Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) has provided us with a novel form of quantum matter and a unique source of ultra-cold atoms. Seventy years would pass before the first BEC could be produced in the lab, made possible by the emergence of ingenious laser and magnetic field techniques for isolating and slowing down the motions of atoms towards the super-cooled state.
The first sighting of a BEC was in June 1996 when Eric Cornell, Carl Wiemann and their team at the JILA laboratory in Boulder, Colorado produced the first gaseous condensate using a rarefied gas of rubidium atoms at extremely low temperatures of less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. At these low temperatures, the individual atoms condensed into the single entity as predicted by Einstein and Bose. Not long afterwards, Wolfgang Ketterle and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a sodium-23 condensate.
For their contributions, Cornell, Wiemann and Ketterle received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. Since then, a new race is on to exploit the wave-like behavior of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC)s for developing quantum computers, super-precise atomic clocks and atomic lasers.
