Foundational Work in Fermionic Condensates

AUG 01, 2004

Carl Wieman

The March 2004 issue of Physics Today (page 21) gave a nice description of the recent results by Cindy Regal, Markus Greiner, and Deborah Jin on the observation of Bose–Einstein condensation of paired fermionic atoms in the interesting strongly interacting regime. Unfortunately, the article failed to mention the seminal theoretical work of Murray Holland and coworkers ¹ that inspired the experiment discussed. Holland’s work demonstrated that one could get strong coupling in a cold fermionic gas near a Feshbach resonance, and hence BEC at very high temperatures, just as was observed. Eddy Timmermans and coworkers published similar ideas at about the same time. ²

Incidentally, Tin-Lun Ho’s comment to Physical Review Letters, in which he disputed the reported interpretation, was withdrawn.

References

1. M. Holland et al., Phys Rev. Lett. 87, 120406 (2001).
2. E. Timmermans et al., Phys. Lett. A 285, 228 (2001).

More about the Authors

Carl Wieman. University of Colorado, Boulder, US .