New Atom Lasers Eject Atoms or Run CW
DOI: 10.1063/1.882646
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 P
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