Feat of Experimental Acrobatics Leads to First Synthesis of Ultracold Molecules; Achievement Could Benefit Fields of Superchemistry, Quantum Computing.

(From AScribe)

CHICAGO -- A research team that in 2003 created an exotic new form of matter has now shown for the first time how to arrange that matter into complex molecules.

The experiments -- conducted by Cheng Chin, now at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues under the leadership of Rudolf Grimm at Innsbruck University in Austria -- may lead to a better scientific understanding of superconductivity and advance a growing new field called superchemistry. In the long term, they may also provide a strategy that could aid the development of quantum computers.

"In this field, it's hard to predict what's going to happen, because none of this was possible before 2003," said Chin, an Assistant Professor in Physics. Chin, Grimm and five colleagues will report their findings in a future issue of journal Physical Review Letters.

The new form of matter that the Innsbruck University team produced in 2003 is called a Fermion superfluid, which exists only at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero. Superfluids exhibit characteristics distinctively different from the solids, liquids and gases that dominate everyday life. Most notably, superfluids can flow ceaselessly without any energy loss whatsoever. Science magazine named this work one of the top 10 breakthroughs of 2004.

In creating the Fermion superfluid, the team extended the work that earned the Nobel Prize in Physics for Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman in 2001. Those scientists had succeeded in creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate. Building on the work of Satyendra Nath Bose, Albert Einstein predicted in the 1920s that a special state of matter would form when a group of atoms collapsed into their lowest energy state. In this state now named for them, all of the atoms behave as if they are all one giant atom.

Cornell, Ketterle and Wieman created their Bose-Einstein condensate out of bosons, one of the two major categories of subatomic particles. Bosons carry force, while the other category of particles, fermions, comprise matter. Chin and the Innsbruck team showed in 2003 that, with some difficulty, fermions -- in this case, lithium atoms -- also can be coaxed into a Bose-Einstein condensate.