Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington           July 18, 2002
(Phone: 202/358-1726)

Jane Platt
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(Phone: 818/354-0880)

RELEASE: 02-130

ATOM RESEARCH MAY HELP DETECT VOLCANOES AND OCEANS

     Breakthrough research on waves of ultra-cold atoms may 
lead to sophisticated atom lasers that might eventually 
predict volcanic eruptions on Earth and map a probable 
subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa.

The atoms were manipulated to form tidy bundles of waves, 
called solitons, which retained their shape and strength. They 
were created in a laboratory at Rice University, Houston, 
under a grant from NASA's Biological and Physical Research 
Program through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, 
Calif.

Normally, when a wave forms -- whether in water, light or 
atoms -- it tends to spread out as it travels. Not so with a 
soliton wave. It maintains its perfect shape without 
spreading. In the Rice University research, the solitons are 
localized bundles of atom waves.

Atom-wave solitons could be used in advanced lasers, which use 
atoms instead of light photons. Dr. Randall Hulet, the Rice 
University physics and astronomy professor who led the 
research team, said atom lasers may have many applications, 
some not yet envisioned.

"Forty years ago, no one imagined that lasers would be used to 
play music in our cars or scan our food at the grocery store 
checkout," said Hulet. "We're getting our first glimpse of a 
wondrous and sometimes surprising set of quantum phenomena, 
and there's no way to know exactly what may come out of it."

Hulet said atom lasers might improve instruments that study 
gravity variations to locate and measure underground water, 
minerals, oil, caves and volcanic magma on Earth.

"Eventually, atom-wave lasers may enhance sensors for studying 
Earth and various bodies in the solar system," said Dr. Lute 
Maleki, principal investigator for the Quantum Gravity 
Gradient Project at JPL. "With these advanced sensors, we'll 
be able to produce a 3-D map of underground features. By 
measuring levels of underground magma, for example, scientists 
may be able to predict volcanic eruptions. This technology 
could be used on a spacecraft to map the ocean believed to lie 
beneath Europa's icy crust."

In addition, atom lasers may yield extremely precise gyroscope 
navigation for air and space travel. Computers would run 
faster if atom lasers were used to write directly onto 
computer chips.

The first recorded observation of a soliton wave was in 1834, 
when a man in Scotland saw a barge stop suddenly in a canal. 
This created a large bow wave, which traveled at about 8 miles 
per hour without shrinking or spreading. The man followed the 
wave on horseback for about a mile until he lost sight of it 
in the windings of the canal. Scientists now know that this 
soliton water wave formed because of particular relationships 
between the depth and width of the canal.

In their laboratory, Hulet and his team confined lithium atoms 
within magnetic fields, cooled them with lasers to one billion 
times colder than room temperature, and confined them in a 
narrow beam of light that pushed them into a single file 
formation. The atoms formed a type of matter called a Bose-
Einstein condensate, a quantum state where classical laws of 
physics go out the window and new behaviors govern the atoms. 
Instead of hitting each other and bouncing off like bumper 
cars, the atoms join together and function as one entity. The 
team actually observed a "soliton train" of multiple waves.

Hulet co-authored a paper on the research, which appeared in 
the May 9 issue of the journal Nature, with Rice University 
graduate students Kevin Strecker and Guthrie Partridge, and 
Dr. Andrew Truscott, formerly a post-doctoral researcher at 
Rice and currently on the faculty at Australian National 
University in Canberra.

More information on the experiment and the Biological and 
Physical Research Program and the Fundamental Physics Program 
is available at:

http://atomcool.rice.edu
http://spaceresearch.nasa.gov
http://funphysics.jpl.nasa.gov

Hulet's research was funded by NASA, the Office of Naval 
Research, the National Science Foundation, and the R.A. Welch 
Foundation. JPL manages the Fundamental Physics in 
Microgravity Research Program for NASA's Office of Biological 
and Physical Research, Washington. JPL is a division of the 
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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