A Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter of bosons confined in an external potential and cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero (0 K or -273.15°C). Under such supercooled conditions, a large fraction of the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state of the external potential, at which point quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale.
This state of matter was first predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose in 1925. Bose submitted a paper to the Zeitschrift für Physik but was turned down by the peer review. Bose then took his work to Einstein who recognized its merit and had it published under the names Bose and Einstein, hence the acronymn.
Seventy years later, the first gaseous condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST-JILA lab, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvin (nK)(1.7 • 10 − 7 K or -273.14999983°C). Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT were awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics in Stockholm, Sweden.
UNUSUAL CHARACTERISTICS
Further experimentation by the JILA team in 2000 uncovered a hitherto unknown property of Bose–Einstein condensates. Cornell, Wieman, and their coworkers originally used rubidium-87, an isotope whose atoms naturally repel each other, making a more stable condensate. The JILA team instrumentation now had better control over the condensate so experimentation was made on naturally attracting atoms of another rubidium isotope, rubidium-85 (having negative atom-atom scattering length). Through a process called Feshbach resonance involving a sweep of the magnetic field causing spin flip collisions, the JILA researchers lowered the characteristic, discrete energies at which the rubidium atoms bond into molecules making their Rb-85 atoms repulsive and creating a stable condensate. The reversible flip from attraction to repulsion stems from quantum interference among condensate atoms which behave as waves.
When the scientists raised the magnetic field strength still further, the condensate suddenly reverted back to attraction, imploded and shrank beyond detection, and then exploded, blowing off about two-thirds of its 10,000 or so atoms. About half of the atoms in the condensate seemed to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, not being seen either in the cold remnant or the expanding gas cloud. Carl Wieman explained that under current atomic theory this characteristic of Bose–Einstein condensate could not be explained because the energy state of an atom near absolute zero should not be enough to cause an implosion; however, subsequent mean-field theories have been proposed to explain it.
Because supernova explosions are implosions, the explosion of a collapsing Bose–Einstein condensate was named "bosenova", a pun on the musical style bossa nova.
The atoms that seem to have disappeared almost certainly still exist in some form, just not in a form that could be detected in that experiment. Two likely possibilities are that they formed molecules consisting of two bonded rubidium atoms, or that they somehow received enough energy to fly away fast enough that they left the observation region before they could be observed.
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