A Bose-Einstein condensate at room temperature. I thought it was the low energy state that resulted in the superfluidity.
Nothing new. Just watch the temperature drop when Shrillary enters a room.
Very interesting, indeed. Almost as interesting as the discovery of high-temperature superconductors some years ago.
We live in interesting times.
I gotta Bose several years back. But it sure was 'spensive for a raaHdio!
Wow now this really is exciting. Imagine what can be done with something like this at room temp. Opens up whole new worlds of materials science. These really are exciting times.
bump to try and understand this later
In a commentary published with the reports, Snoke says that the magnon-making study, while promising, lacks firm evidence that the magnetic waves exactly match each other as they should in a condensate.
Demokritov says that in additional experiments, his team has demonstrated that the waves match.
Yes, but how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Didn't scientists also turn the Bose-Einstein condensate into a micro black hole (non-gravitational) in which if you stuffed too many atoms (about 23 lithium atoms if I remember correctly) it would explode (Bose nova they called it). Wonder if they will be able to do that with these room temperature Bose-Einstein condensates.
Tip of the iceberg. Google "Superfluid Helium 3", a Scientific American article from way back in 1976. That one article really turned on my sleeping physics interest, it explains how UFOs work and why He3 is the key isotope in a type II superconducting ring. By private reply only, I can tell you how it all works, but be prepared to have your "common sense" WARPED. What did Einstein say about "common sense"?
I could swear he's writing in English!
then it would be a quasi-condensate.
I can't wait until some genius discovers an energy source that will last until virtually infinity, with little to no extraction effort and no pollutants. The enviro wackos will curse that person like you've never heard. Whoever upsets the Sierra Club apple cart will be regarded as the agent of Satan (if they actually believed in Satan).
Temperature is a measure of average energy of the excited states of the system. "Low" temperature is relative, and means that the average excitation is small compared to the energy of the lowest excited state, so the ground state becomes highly populated, and the "condensation" results from the tendency, due to quantum statistics, of the other bosons to make a transition to an already populated state.
My take on the condensation claimed here is that the excited states being created have a large energy compared to room temperature, but also no neighboring states, so that many exciton-polaritons are created in the same state, which is the "ground state" for these particles. They can only give up energy by being annihilated. So room temperature is a "low" temperature for these particles.
I think something like this must be right, but I would expect the exciton-polaritons, like phonons, to have a nearly continuous spectrum of energies, so I don't see why they end up in some kind of pseudo-ground state, unless they
are pumped into it, like a laser.
Actually, "condensation" is based on the same principle as "lasing", and I'm not sure why this is not counted as the latter instead of the former.