What would a macroscopic Bose-Einstein condensate look like, and 'do'?

There are several places on the web that discuss this new state of matter. There's one at Rice University and one at the JILA. The bottom line is that these discoveries were made by cooling a few thousand atoms to a micro Kelvin, and the state occupied a region a few microns in diameter. To get something you could see, you would need something about 1000 microns in diameter ( 1 millimeter) and that would take, literally, a billion more atoms assuming the density remains constant. The truth is, the scientists that created this state have not studied it thoroughly enough to understand all of its properties, so we just don't know what a big BEC would look like.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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