A spinless Bose-Einstein condensate

Insensitive to external magnetic fields, has been created. Researchers at Kyoto University made their BEC with ytterbium-174, a rare-earth element with two valence electrons. The physicists used light beams to trap approximately 1 million Yb atoms in the singlet state, in which the valence electrons’ spins point in opposite directions. The hotter atoms evaporated, leaving a gas cloud of about 5000 atoms that formed a magnetically unresponsive BEC at temperatures below 790 nK. The spinless BEC may be useful for precise atomic deposition and atom interferometry. Also, the heavy mass of Yb makes it desirable for studying certain fundamental physics effects, such as atomic parity violation and time symmetry violation. Moreover, the many stable isotopes of Yb (five are bosons, two are fermions) raise the possibility of creating a BEC and a Fermi degenerate gas in the same cloud. (Y. Takasu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 , 040404, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.040404 )