A compact device sustains a fluid of bosons

Golež, Denis; Sun, Zhiyuan

doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02876-x

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27 October 2021

A compact device sustains a fluid of bosons

A device that generates exotic fluids of particles at equilibrium conditions and high temperatures could have applications ranging from low-loss electrical cables to memory storage.

Denis Golež⁰ &
Zhiyuan Sun¹

Denis Golež
1. Denis Golež is in the Department of Theoretical Physics, the Department of Complex Matter, Jožef Stefan Institute and Faculty for Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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Zhiyuan Sun
1. Zhiyuan Sun is in the Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
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Imagine that your favourite cinema has just installed a single VIP seat that everybody wants to sit in. If cinema-goers were bosons, a type of elementary particle, they could all fit in this seat at the same time. This is the physics behind Bose–Einstein condensation, a phenomenon that involves a large fraction of the bosons in a gas simultaneously occupying the quantum state with the lowest energy. Bose–Einstein condensates have been achieved in cold atomic gases, a type of gas comprising atoms held at a temperature near absolute zero. But sustaining microkelvin temperatures is far from trivial because of the size of the machinery required. Writing in Nature, Ma et al.¹ report a fluid of bosons in equilibrium, generated in a compact solid-state device at temperatures as high as 100 K — well within the reach of an ordinary physics laboratory. However, it remains to be confirmed whether it is indeed a Bose–Einstein condensate.

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Nature 598, 571-572 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02876-x

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