The atoms are further cooled in the magnetic trap by selecting the hottest atoms and kicking them out of the trap. The trickiest part was trapping a high enough density of atoms at a cold enough temperature, according to the team. Because the coldest atoms had a tendency to fall out of the center of the standard atom trap like marbles dropping through a funnel, Cornell designed a technique to move the funnel around. The 2,000 rubidium atoms in the condensate are in a strange condition, existing in a kind of smeared-out, overlapping stew, most of the properties of which are still a big unknown. The condensation is like an atomic counterpart to the laser because it puts a large number of atoms into the same quantum mechanical state, the scientists said.
Lasers cause a large number of photons to have identical energy and direction.
Wieman said he was surprised that the condensation appeared so dramatically. This is always the picture I had in mind of the best possible thing we could have observed. He added that the apparatus to conduct the experiment is not particularly exotic or expensive, so the results should be fairly easy to reproduce and confirm in other laboratories. It will provide physicists with a new way of studying quantum effects on a large scale, similar to the threshold effects observed in superconductivity and superfluidity. In addition to being a fellow of JILA, Cornell is a senior scientist at NIST and an adjoint assistant professor of physics at CU-Boulder.