Skip to Content
Uncategorized

MIT Physicists Create Superfluid from Fermions

Physicists classify all elementary particles as either bosons (which have an integer quantum spin) or fermions (which have a half-integer spin). Ten years ago, researchers at the University of Colorado and MIT cooled bosons to temperatures so low that they…
June 24, 2005

Physicists classify all elementary particles as either bosons (which have an integer quantum spin) or fermions (which have a half-integer spin). Ten years ago, researchers at the University of Colorado and MIT cooled bosons to temperatures so low that they formed a superfluid – a completely frictionless or zero-viscosity state sometimes known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, since it was predicted in the 1920s by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein. In the June 23 issue of Nature, an MIT team led by Wolfgang Ketterle reports that they’ve done the same for fermions.

The researchers cooled atoms of a lithium-6 isotope to 50 billionths of one degree Kelvin above absolute zero, then trapped the atoms inside the electric and magnetic fields produced by infrared laser beams. When they set the gas spinning using another laser, a latticework of tiny vortices appeared; these vortices are one signature of a superfluid.

The ability to create superfluids from fermions in the lab could be key to understanding a related phenomenon, superconductivity, in which metals are cooled to temperatures so low that flowing electrons encounter zero resistance. It could also shed light on the workings of neutron stars and quark-gluon plasmas, which are thought to have pervaded the universe shortly after the big bang.

The work is described at length in MIT News and a commentary in Nature.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.