July 18, 2006

Bose-Einstein Condensates What they are and how they are made, and how to cool things with lasers and magnets explained in a way even a dummy like me can understand.
posted by six.oh.six 18 years ago
  • Neat. Makes me want to do all my baking in Kelvin.
  • cool, to an atomic level Wish they'd had sites like this when I was falling-asleep over turgid textbooks of Quantum stuff at Uni. Also, much better than the animations in What the Bleep, which seems quite misleading (from the excerpts I've seen).
  • Great link! That was a fun read. I had read several articles on BES before, but it was nice to get such a great conceptualization in my mind, rather than ploughing through equations!
  • Excellente! I learned a lot.
  • Really good. Thanks !
  • Kelvin's not here, man.
  • (nifty page too btw, thanks)
  • Absolut Kelvin.
  • Grrrreat post. A well-done and clearly written explanation. One weird thing about the Bose-Einstein condensate is that if you manipulate it inside a magnetic field, it can explode in a fashion that looks like a tiny supernova. They call this phenomena, "bosenova". I keed you not. Those wacky physicists.
  • And half of the bosenova atoms are unaccounted for. Whoa.