New Atom Lasers Eject Atoms or Run CW

APR 01, 1999

Recently, a Munich atom laser ran continuously for 100 ms until it ran out of condensate. And a NIST atom laser shot out atoms with a chosen velocity.

DOI: 10.1063/1.882646

Gloria B. Lubkin

The experimental observation of Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) in rubidium in 1995 demonstrated that a macroscopic number of bosons could be produced in a single quantum state of trapped atoms. The occupation of a single quantum state by a large number of identical bosons is the matter‐wave analog of the storage of photons in a single mode of a laser cavity. In a conventional laser, one extracts a coherent beam of photons from a cavity by using a partially transmitting mirror as an output coupler. In 1997, Wolfgang Ketterle and his collaborators at MIT built a pulsed output coupler that extracted matter waves from a condensate, and they observed interference between atoms from two separate condensates, thereby demonstrating an atom laser for the first time (see PHYSICS TODAY, March 1997, page 17).