Deborah Jin Keeps it Cool with Quantum Mechanics

The 2004 Scientific American 50 researcher of the year continues to tweak matter at the edge of known physics to reveal strange and potentially useful properties

Recognized for: Creating a novel state of matter that may help improve our understanding of superconductors. These are materials in which all resistance to an electrical current disappears at temperatures ranging from near absolute zero to as "warm" as around –170 degrees Fahrenheit (–112 degrees Celsius). Someday, superconductors could make for incredibly efficient power lines and electronic devices, but the development of such practical, room-temperature versions relies on a better understanding of the quantum mechanical properties of their far colder cousins.

To do that, scientists would like to get subatomic particles into arrangements that mimic superconductors. That's been a struggle: It took more than 70 years for researchers to coax frigid bosons—which, along with fermions, are the basic particles that comprise all known visible matter in the universe—into an arrangement dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensate, named for physicists Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose who predicted it in 1924.

Then, in late 2003, National Institutes of Standards and Technology physicist Deborah Jin's team used lasers and magnetic fields to steady and chill potassium atoms until they formed the first ever so-called fermionic condensate. In both kinds of condensates, the atoms share the same quantum state and behave identically. In this way, the condensate state of matter is analogous to what happens in superconductors, where fermionic electrons couple up and overcome their like-charge repulsions to flow freely, Jin says.

没有评论:

发表评论