Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 27, 2022 14:29:30 GMT
A Bose-Einstein condensate is a highly weird state of matter. People early on in their education will be told by teacher there are three states of matter: gas, liquid and solid. Later on one learns there is a forth state called a plasma, but few tell of the filth state. It was a theoretical idea Bose had in the 1920s to do with statistics. You get a ensemble of particles and they either follow Fermi-Dirac statistics or Bose-Einstein statistics, where the one type is called a boson and the other type is called a fermion. Bosons have integer spins and fermions have half spins like 1/2, 3/2 etc rather than 1, 2, 3... In order to make a Bose-Einstein condensate one needs bosons. Bosons can be massive particles like helium nuclei, or they can be photons which have a zero rest mass and behave in an entirely different way. What you do then to create this state is you cool down a very low pressure gas so that each particle is very likely to be in its ground state, so you reach a point where most of the particle have zero energy and when this is the case it is impossible to tell one particle from another, so the statistics of the distribution consequently changes. This results in a state where the particles are now acting as a system rather than individual isolated particles. The wave functions splay out so they overlap.
The first demonstration of this was in 1995 using rubidium atoms at 170nK and it was not long before other bosons were found to achieve this state, all at very low temperatures. However I did mention photons earlier which can also be demonstrated to work, but fortunately at room temperature. Now for something stranger too, this works for quasi particles and in the video of IBM's latest research it is using excitons, which is an electron and electron hole which couple together in close proximity in a semiconductor material, again at room temperature.
I've cued this up to skip the bullshit on Gordon Moore and what a transistor is to the point where it explains the operation of this device.
Some background physics
