Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is Bose Einstein Condensate

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Have you heard of "Bose Einstein Condensate" but never really understood it? D&J break it down for you. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And here's Heather with the weather. Well, it's beautiful out there, sunny and 75, almost a little chilly in the shade. Now, let's get a read on the inside of your car. It is hot.

You've only been parked a short time, and it's already 99 degrees in there. Let's not leave children in the back seat while running errands. It only takes a few minutes for their body temperatures to rise. and that could be fatal. Cars get hot, fast, and can be deadly. Never leave a child in a car. A message from Nitsa and the ad council. Hey, Jorge, do you know who is the first person to reach the South Pole?

Hmm. It was probably a Norwegian? Wasn't someone called Roald Umundsen? Yeah, he's pretty famous. But do you know who the second? or third place finishes were. Ooh, I'm going to guess, Rold Amundsen Jr.

Or Rall Amundsen the third? I have no idea. You know, those people who came in second and third, they risked their lives, literally froze their butts off, and we don't even know who they are. Oh, man. Well, in this case,

it was literally a race to the bottom of the world. But, yeah, you're right. I guess second place doesn't get much attention. And the same is true in science. There's no consolation prize for the Nobel. You don't get a silver Nobel price? They should hand out a silver and a bronze. Is it an honorable mention? Or is it just an honor to be nominated?

Hi, I'm Horam, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a part. article of physicist. And if I was in the running for the Nobel Prize, I wouldn't get the silver or the bronze. I would get the plywood Nobel Prize. You get the, uh, thanks for trying coupon. I get the pin a ribbon on him and say thanks. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we take a tour of all the incredible things that scientists have won the Nobel Prize for and dive deep into all the things that science has not yet figured out. All the things that people want to understand.

and all those weird mysteries of the universe that nobody has yet figured out. Because it's a big, mysterious universe out there and humans are trying to make sense of it and come up with theories about how it all works. But it is, after all, a human endeavor. And so it's about humans chipping away at the big unknown questions of the universe.

And here on the show, we like to talk about the smallest things. We like to break open the universe and find out what it's made out of what are the smallest things. But another sort of orthogonal way to approach discovery is trying to make matter do weird stuff. Like you're familiar with three states of matter, solids, liquids, and gases. But it turns out there are lots of other really weird things that matter can do. Yeah, there are other states of matter like super hot forms like plasma and also super cold forms.

And one of these forms is a pretty well-known form that we're going to talk about today. That's right. If you get matter into really weird configurations, it will do strange stuff. And this is a great way to learn about what the rules are. How does it fit together? What are the forces that are involved? And it's just fun to make matter be weird. Can you make it shiny?

Can you make it jump? Can you make it superconducting? Can you make it super fluid? Can you make it act as a single blob? It's fun to make new kinds of goo. Would that be your bumper sticker, Daniel? Keep matter weird? Yeah, because one of the basic ways to explore the universe is just to look around.

you and see, like, what kinds of stuff is there? You know, the very first people to think about what is the universe made out of just sort of organized the stuff around them into like, you know, air, fire, earth, and water. And that's a reflection that there are different kinds of things. And even though we know that the universe is made fundamentally of tiny little particles, those particles come together in really weird ways. I mean, who could predict solids and gases and all sorts of weird behavior from just the tiny particles. articles. It's complicated. So while it's worthwhile to like dig down deep to the tiny bits, it's also really worthwhile to figure out how those bits play together to make weird stuff.

Yeah. So to the end of the program, we'll be asking the question. What is a Bose-Einstein condensate? Now, Daniel, I'm guessing this is not related to Bose speakers or being like a Bose. No, I think Bose was an early investor in the Bose speaker system. They're not related. The Bose family fortune came from physics. No, but they are related to the Higgs boson. It's the same Bose.

Is it? No. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. The Bose Einstein condensate is related to the Higgs boson. It's the same Bose. It's a famous Indian physicist whose last name was Bose. And the kind of particle that we call a boson, a particle of spin one, is named after Bose.

Oh, wow. And he's also the guy who worked together with Einstein to come up with this idea of a weird state of matter called the Bose-Einstein content. Wow. So he did rock it like a ball. And I don't know if you remember, but after the Higgs-Boson was discovered, there were a lot of folks in India who were like, hey, how come Higgs is getting all the credit? After all, what about Bose's important contribution?

His name is half of Higgs-Boson. Why isn't he getting as much credit? Wow. I guess it lots its brand appeal, like Kleenex. Yeah, well, if you're going to get your name on stuff, you know, you can get your name on one individual particle like Higgs, or you can get your name on like a whole class of particles like bosons. Bosons are anything with integer spin.

That's like half the particles out there. Photons, Ws, Zs, all these are boson particles. Right. Well, so today this is about states of matter. And you're right. It is kind of interesting that, you know, we can talk about what matter is and what it does and what it looks like. But we can also talk about the ways it can form itself or the ways that it

can exist out there. Yeah, and it's incredible that we can sometimes predict this. We can just, like, write down math on a piece of paper and say, we think if you put these atoms in this weird configuration, they will do this amazing, crazy thing you can't otherwise see. And then it's a game of seeing whether you can do it. You know, it's an experimental challenge. And this is one of those stories where the theorists were decades and decades ahead of the

experimentalists. They had this idea in the 20s. And it wasn't until the 90s that. people figured it out. Wow. That means that it was one of these like plums hanging out there where everybody knew if you could be the first one to do it, you would get a Nobel Prize. And there was sort of like, you know, progress for 10 years and then things ground to a halt and nobody had any good ideas. And then a burst of progress. And then very late in the game, a quick sprint to the

finish line where, you know, the people who crossed the finish line first, they win the Nobel prize and everybody else just has a cold gas of atoms. Oh, man. So only two people, are famous, the people who come up with a problem and the people who solve the problem. Everyone in between gets for God. That's right. And if you find this kind of story inspiring, you know, there are plenty of other things out there, which everybody knows if you discover them, you would win a Nobel Prize. And maybe we're five years, maybe we're 50 years away from discovering those things and

somebody getting the Nobel Prize. But there is plenty of low-hanging fruit left in physics. All right. Are you making a plug for bananas, Daniel? Because they're pretty low-hanging in general. People have discovered bananas already, sorry to burst your bubble. Well, such is the case for the Bose-Einstein condensate. And as usual, we were wondering how many people out there knew what this was

or were familiar with what the state of matter is. And so as usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people what is a Bose-Einstein condensate. That's right. And if you'd like to participate in our random person on the internet questions, please write to us to question. at Danielanhorpe.com, we would love to hear your thoughts

for future upcoming episodes. Here's what people had to say. I would imagine something to do with Albert Einstein, though I don't think it has anything to do with Bose audio. I would guess it might have something to do with bosons and condensate means maybe something with the way they behave at a particular temperature or pressure. Maybe it's a speaker that vibrates water out of the air

and then uses the hydrogen to blow up your house. Well, I heard about it, but I don't remember it's some kind of state or I don't know. I think Bose was a fellow that was around before Einstein who came up with the initial concept. And then I think Einstein sweetened the deal a little bit, but this was around something hectic to do with the theory of relativity and the expansion of the universe and universal constants. So I think it was something related to that, but I can't quite. quite remember. I know it was mentioned on the podcast recently. It was fifth state of matter, I think, if I'm not wrong. The scientists in the ISS lab found it in

some atom cold lab that instrument name and they discovered it. It's been theoretical so far and this is a first time that something exists in that state of matter. All right. Well, it sounds like a lot of people knew it was a state of matter. Yeah, yeah, except for the folks who thought it was a speaker that vibrates water out of the air and blows up your house. Wow. Where did that one come from, right? I don't know. That must have been like an awesome installation of massive Bose speakers that shattered somebody's windows or something.

And I like somebody made that connection to the bosons. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there's some good general knowledge out there. Good job, listeners. Yeah. So Bose Einstein condensate. Daniel, let's dig into it.

What is it? I'm guessing it has something to do with Einstein and maybe condensed milk. Is that the? Sweetened condensed milk. Yes, absolutely. It's a recipe for lemon bars by Bose and Einstein. Only if you get it cold enough. And only the first bite.

Yeah. So what it is is a new state of matter, another state of matter, different from liquid, solid, or gas, or even plasma. And as you said before, those are states of matter sort of organized in terms of temperature increasing, right? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma. And what happens there is the particles are disassociating as they get hotter and hotter. They tend to move around more. They have less restrictions. But there are these phase differences, right?

Things don't go smoothly from solid to liquid and liquid to gas. They're these transitions where suddenly things behave differently. Wait, isn't there in middle state called a smoothie or a carbonated drink? That's right. It's called the margarita. There you go. That's the state of matter you discover after you win the Nogo Prize, right? At the happy hour.

Yeah, it's made of dacharan. So there are these interesting transitions, and that's fascinating, right? That these particles tend to work in one way, and then you cross them over a threshold, and they tend to work in another way. Like, there are different rules for gases and liquids and solids and plasmas. Right. And it has something to do with the forces that bind atoms together and particles together, right? Like at some point, their energy is more than that bond, and so they start arranging themselves in different ways.

Exactly. And so you have to understand it from the microscopic. topic, you say, well, what's the dominant force? And just like you said, when things get cold, the dominant force is this crystal structure of the atoms that are holding them together. And after that, the dominant energetic contribution is the kinetic energy of the objects. But there's still some bonds, right? The bonds between atoms in a liquid are what give you things like surface pressure and constant volume and stuff. And so you have to understand like what are the dominant forces and how are they playing together. And so you take these little atoms and you try to

think, what are their emergent properties? And this is a really hard thing to do to go from the microscopic, like I have a few little particles, to understanding the whole thing. It's like why hurricanes are difficult. You know, we understand how particles of water move through the atmosphere. It's not hard, but how do you understand 10 trillion of them swirling around in really complex situations? So this kind of theory is very difficult. And Bose and Einstein were playing around with the math and they figured out a new phase. They're like, ooh, here's a way if you arrange the particles in this special way, you could get completely different behavior from anything we've seen before. I guess you're saying it's sort of like an emergent property that

means that it's like how they all behave collectively. And you're saying that it doesn't, you know, like you can't talk about one atom being solid liquid or gas, right? You have to talk about like a collection of them. That's right. You have to talk about the state of like many particles. You know, I think about physics sort of like in layers, right? We have rules for how the solar system operates and we think about the planets as like an individual blob. But then we also have rules for how winds move and fluid dynamics. And then we have on another layer, we have rules for individual particles. And then deeper down, we have rules for like how the corks move inside those particles.

And in principle, all you need to know is the sort of lowest level stuff, the tiniest particles. Those really do determine everything else. But in practice, it's hard. It's a hard way to do stuff. Like, it's hard to predict how a hurricane works, even if you understand wind and water. And the amazing thing is how much interesting stuff you discover that's not fundamental like tiny particles, but comes out at the higher levels like hurricanes. And this stuff can be simply described by new laws of physics that work at that higher level. Like, you don't need to know about particles to understand how cannibal flies and have a math formula that.

describes it. And that's why phases of matter are super fascinating. Not because they're fundamental, but because they emerge. All right. So then Einstein got together with this scientist called Bose and they hung out and worked out the math together or

how did they work together? I think Bose actually worked out the basic idea first and then Einstein read his paper and extended it. And the result was this prediction that if you took atoms and you made them not super hot like you would need to get a plasma, but super duper duper cold, then they would do something really interesting, but only if there were a certain

kind of particle, a particle called a boson. Oh, I see. So this is not about atoms. It's more like when we're talking about particular particles. Well, there's two kinds of particles. There are fermions and there are bosons. Firmions are particles that have a certain kind of spin, half an integer that can have spin one-half or minus one-half. And bosons are particles that have spin that are an integer. So they can have spin like 1, 0, or minus 1. Now, that's not really a big deal. It doesn't really matter. But every atom, for example, is either a fermion or a boson, depending on how you build it up out of the little particles. So, for example, rubidium is a boson because of the particles it's made out of. You can also have fermionic atoms. Oh, what? Are electrons? What are electrons? Electrons?

And quarks are fernions, right? Electrons are fermions. At the particle level, the smallest level, level, all of the matter particles, quarks and leptons, are fermions, while the force particles, photons, et cetera, are bosons. But you can combine fermions together to make bosons. So like two electrons together can make a bosonic pair because the one halves can add up to an integer. And that's why, for example, you can make bosons out of fermions. Whoa.

There's some really complicated spin arithmetic there that we probably don't want to get into. And vocabulary. I feel like you're confusing me with. vocabulary again, Daniel. But like a Higgs boson then is made out of other things, or is the Higgs boson a boson? Bosons don't have to be made of fermions. They can be fundamental like the Higgs. But all the force particles like the Higgs boson, the photon, the W and the Z fundamentally are bosons.

Oh, I see. But fermions can get together and become like boson. Yes, absolutely. You can combine the half spin Lego pieces to make integer spin pieces. Oh, I see. But they have to come in like in pairs. I guess, right? Yeah.

You have to combine them the right way. So does it have to do with like if the atom has an even number of electrons? Yes. Yes, exactly. So you can make bosons. You can make fermions. Every atom can be fermions. You can have bosons, et cetera.

But there's an important difference because bosons can do something that fermions cannot do. Which is hang out together, you're saying. Yes, they can hang out together. So fermions, for a reason that nobody really understands, can never share a quantitative. state. Like, that's the reason why electrons, which are fermions, don't all lie in the ground state of an atom. Like, you have an atom with 10 electrons in it. They don't all just lie in the lowest energy level. They stack on top of each other. The energy levels are a ladder. You can only have one electron per layer of the ladder because they're fermions. Bosons are happy to all hang out at the bottom level.

Right, like in the nucleus. In many configurations. Like, you can have a laser, which is a bunch of photons, which are bosons, all in the same quantum state. And so we have two kinds of particles, bosons and fermions, and we understand sort of mathematically why this happens. It emerges from the math. But we don't really fundamentally intuitively understand why bosons can all hang out in the same state and fermions just will not. Like there's this famous story about how somebody asked Feynman, hey Feynman, can you explain this to us why bosons can all hang out in the same state and fermions can't? And he came back and he said, you know, I don't have an explanation that I can use on like 18 year olds, which means I don't really understand it. That's right.

He's famous for saying nobody understands quantum physics, right? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it does come out of the mathematics, but we don't intuitively understand it. It's just a weird fact about the universe. All right. But it means that if you put a bunch of boson particles together, they can all hang out in the coldest, lowest, lowest, quantum state. And that is the Einstein Bose condensate. Yes. So they predicted that if you get a bunch of these particles together, you get them

really cold, they can all be in the same quantum state. And then something really weird would happen. That because they'd be so close together and so cold that the size of their quantum wavelength would be larger than the distance between them. And so they would basically merge and all have the same quantum state and act like one big quantum particle. All right, cool. Let's get into it a little bit more and how that all works. But first, let's take a quick break. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very

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the team behind the scenes at Authrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about the Bose-Einstein condensate, and you're saying that it's related to this idea that bosons can hang out together and they can share a quantum state. I guess maybe some people might be wondering, what does that mean? Like, they're sharing a quantum state.

Does that mean that they have all the same quantum properties and are sitting in the same spot? Yeah, it means that they sit on top of each other. They can be in the same location, and they can share all the same quantum properties. And this is really interesting because usually you have just one particle in a quantum state. And, you know, we know the quantum state is sort of a thing that controls what happens to one particle. It's like a list of all the possibilities for what that particle can do. But since you only ever have one particle in a quantum state, you don't really see the full distribution. But if you have a bunch of particles and they're all in that same one quantum state,

then you can see sort of the whole distribution. you can like physically look at this thing and see, oh, here's the distribution of all the possible things that can happen to this particle because you have 10 million particles and they're all in the same quantum states. You get to see sort of all the outcomes at once. But only if they're a boson. Only if they're a boson because only bosons can do this. Fermions can only have one particle per quantum state. Bosons, you can have any number of particles all in the lowest quantum state. Now, how do you get a bunch of particles in the same quantum state?

Well, the only way really to do that is to push them up against the wall of temperature. And you can't get them all in the same quantum state if they're at 200 degrees because there's a billion different quantum states. So what you do is you make them really, really cold so that there's only one state available to them, the lowest one. And then they all pile up in that quantum state. And Einstein and Bose predicted that if you did that, you would get this blob where the particles sort of lose their individuality. They become a macroscopically sized. Like, you could see it quantum mechanically behaving objects. I guess maybe I'm getting tripped up because I'm thinking of these things as particles as like little things.

But maybe, you know, if you think of them as waves, then it maybe makes more sense. Like, you know, fermions, you can't have a wave on top of another wave, but bosons, they're happy to stack together as waves. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yeah. And every time you think about these things, you should not be thinking about a tiny little spinning ball of matter, right? Because that's not what they are. They're weird quantum mechanical objects. And the intuition you usually have about how a particle, a little thing, moves through space, doesn't work.

But you're right, you can apply that intuition to the waves because the waves follow all those rules. Like waves are deterministic and their future can be predicted and actually move through space. So, yes, you can imagine all those bosonic waves sort of stacking on top of each other. They're all doing the same thing. Right. Whereas like a Fermion bunch of waves, they would all sort of avoid each other. Yeah, exactly. Like droplets that repel each other.

Yeah, or sort of like a game of Connect 4. You know, you slide the pieces in and they stack on top of each other. And once you got one in a slot, you can't get another one in a slot. Whereas bosons, they're just like slide right past each other and they're all happy to go down to the very lowest level. So you couldn't play Connect 4 with bosons. They all stack at the bottom. That would be a hard game to win then. That's right.

Unless it's Connect 1, in which case it's over instantly. All right. So Einstein and Bose figured out that if you cool atoms, you make them cold enough, then with bosons, then they all sort of. to like merge together, all their wave functions. I think you were telling me that like you go over some threshold, like their quantum wave function starts to overlap. The key thing is to get them so cold that through the size of their wave function, the thing that controls where they are,

is about the same as the mean difference in the spacing between them. So that their wave functions actually overlap. So you have like atom number one over here and atom number two over there. They're not literally on top of each other, but their wave functions are now overlap. Yes. And the more you can get them on top of each other, the better. But there's this sort of threshold where their wave functions are now overlapping.

And they think that's when the phase transition occurs and you get this new weird kind of blob that should behave differently. And we'll dig into exactly what this thing can do, but it should behave differently than liquids or gases or solids. Oh, I see. It's kind of like normally the particles or the atoms are bouncing around. They're moving too fast, really far apart from each other. But once you cool it, they start to come together. and at some point their wave functions overlap. They synchronize, I guess, is a good way to put it.

Yeah, they synchronize. They all follow the same rules. They're all in the same state. They can have different actual outcomes because, remember, there's still a random element there, but they all have the same wave functions. They're all determined by the same fundamental dynamics. Wait, there's like one overall wave function

that sort of controls all of them? Yeah, that's right. And, you know, there's nothing stopping you from writing a wave function down for two particles that have nothing to do with each other, but those wave functions factorize, it's just like a product of the two. But when they overlap, when they synchronize, like you said,

then you have a single wave function that describes both particles. And so if you get a bunch of particles, you cool them, they will start to overlap. And suddenly it's like you have a giant particle, right? That's kind of the idea. And they're all sort of like moving together, but they're not really moving. They're just sort of existing in a quantum way together.

Yes. And then together they can do quantum things that you usually can only see on tiny microscopic particles. But now you can see a giant millimeter-sized blob doing these quantum things. A giant, like a millimeter-sized quantum object. That's huge. That's huge, yeah. I mean, in a literal and also significant sense.

And it's not like it has great military applications or it's going to revolutionize the internet. You're not going to see like Bose Einstein computing or whatever. It's mostly just cool. Like, can we make a new weird kind of. goo, especially one that reveals the fundamental quantum nature of the universe in a way that's just totally unambiguous. Yeah, and observable, I guess, because you can look at it. Yeah, people like to see stuff.

And so here, this is quantum mechanics you can see. Wow. And so what kind of weird stuff can it do? Can it, like, teleport or? Well, it can interfere. So you can have like two of these things with different wave functions. And then you sort of overlap them and you see an interference pattern. Like, rather than having a single particle and it's got a probability going here or there, you get these waves in the blob.

You get these interference patterns, these patterns of dark and light in the single blob. And you can do quantum mechanical tunneling. Yeah, that's what I mean by teleporting. They can cross impossible barrier. Yeah. A single particle can have a wave function that exists on both sides of a barrier, right? Like in a potential well and across a barrier to the other side of the well. so that it can't be in between but has a possibility to be on the left and the right.

We did a whole fun podcast episode about quantum tunneling. And the reason that that can happen is that the particle has a probability to be on the left and a probability to be on the right. And particles aren't limited to classical paths. They don't have to go from where they were to where they are. They just have these snapshots. So if your probability to be on the left and then on the right later, that's no problem. You can do that.

That's quantum tunnel. And so that's why it would happen with the blob. it would suddenly appear on the other side of a wall? Yeah, you can have part of the blob on the left and then suddenly have part of the blob on the right, even though it can't go in between. So it can teleport. So we can do weird.

Yeah, yeah, quantum teleportation, sure. So you just have to be cool and you can teleport. Super duper cool, like nanocool. All right, and are there any other interesting things that can do or interesting applications we can use these for? Well, we talked about this once that you can do weird stuff to light. Bose-Einstein condensate, because of its weird properties, can slow down light to, like, the speed of a bicycle. Usually, light travels, you know, 300 million meters per second, but you can slow down light if it goes into various media, and Bose-Einstein condensates can slow it down to, like, the speed of somebody riding a bicycle, and there's a group at Harvard that even was able to stop light inside a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Right, yeah, we talked about light going in and then bouncing around, kind of. or interacting with the Bose-Einstein condensate and essentially slowing down light? Yeah, slowing down light. Or even stopping it. Like, they can have a laser pulse go into the Bose-Einstein condensate and then they can just wait and they can move it somewhere else and then they can have it re-emmit the exact same laser pulse.

Oh, wow. So that's kind of cool. They're working on using Bose-Einstein condensates to build an atom laser. So usually you have a laser made of photons, right? You're shooting beams of light made of tiny little photons. But people are interested in shooting beams. of atoms, atoms that are all in the same quantum state and that can do the same kind of thing as a laser like enhance and resonate with each other. And it has all sorts of weird applications.

Plus, it just seems kind of cool. And so people are building atom lasers using Bose Einstein condensates. That is a really weird thing that matter can do, right? I guess it's all because of quantum mechanics like, you know, solid gas, liquid plasma. Those you can sort of imagine from classical physics, right? But this one is like a very unique quantum state of matter. Yeah. This one you couldn't do if matter really was tiny little classical balls. So you really need a microscopic quantum understanding to make any sense of this. And it's sort of awesome that they just use the math to predict it, right? To say like, ooh, here's how we think this should work. I'm really in all of those kinds of accomplishment. This is a really interesting

story. And so let's get into that. Einstein and Bose figured out this possible quantum state of matter and then it took 70 years to actually sort of do it? Yeah, it took 70 years. And the reason is that they knew it had to be really, really cold. And so this basically just traces the technology available to make stuff super duper cold. A story of refrigeration is what you're saying. Yeah. It's like the race to the South Pole in that sense, right?

It's a race to the bottom of the temperature scale. How cold did it need to be? It needed to be down to like nano Kelvin, like really. Bano Kelvin, like 0.000, 1 Kelvin. Yeah. And very early on in the race, people were able to do stuff like get down to a few degrees Kelvin, you know, tens of degrees Kelvin, and you can do things like super fluid helium, which we think now has a small element of Bose-Einstein condensate in it. But people really wanted to get like a pure Bose-Einstein condensate,

something where most of the atoms were in that state. So it was like unambiguous. And for that to happen, you really have to get the whole thing down to a really, really cold temperature, to nano Kelvin. And so you're saying then that even in the 20s and 30s, I could go down to a few Kelvin. But I guess you needed like a super special technology to go even further. Yeah. And so fast forward to like the 90s and people have been trying to do this and using various techniques. And, you know, we had atomic physics and you could trap individual atoms and do clever stuff.

But people were struggling, right? they sort of hit a wall. And there was a lab at MIT that was trying to use hydrogen. They're like, let's just start with hydrogen. And this is Dan Klepner, his lab at MIT. And he sort of hit a wall in the 90s and couldn't really make much more progress. But that's when the breakthrough happened. He couldn't teleport to the other side.

Yeah. Then people made two really big advances. And there's actually his students that made these advances. Two advances were laser cooling and magnetic evaporation. Wow. These are the two technologies that let them super cool these atoms down to the levels they need to. Wow. All great combinations of words that you sound impressive in a physics sense.

Magnetic evaporation and laser cooling. Yeah. All right, let's get into the details of how they finally found the Bose-Einstein condensate. And let's talk about what awesome things we can do with it. But first, let's take another quick break. A foot washed up, a shoe. With some bones in it, they had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

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There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't want to have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so there's a raise, Daniel, to get the coldest thing possible so that it can snap into the Bose-Einstein state of matter, condensate.

And so they figured out how to do magnetic evaporation to do that. What does that mean? Well, what that means is you have a bunch of atoms and you want to get it colder. How do you do that? Well, one way is to actually make all the atoms each individually slow down. Another way is to just sort of take out its kinetic energy. Yeah, because remember, temperature is basically kinetic energy. The faster these things are moving, the hotter the gas is.

The other way to do it is to start with a larger sample and then just pick out the slower moving ones. Like boil off the hot parts. selectively pick out the slow ones, then you end up with something which is on average colder than what you started. Right. That's kind of what happens to a glass of water when you leave it out, right? Like it's actually a little bit colder than ambient temperature because all the hot water atoms fly off.

Yeah, I think that's true. Or it's sort of like, you know, say you had a glass of ice water and you wanted it colder. Well, one thing you do is put it in the freezer and actually cool it all down. The other thing is you could just fish the ice out of it and be like, oh, look, now I have ice, right? and you just leave the hot parts behind. So magnetic evaporation sort of works like that. It says, let's just pick out the coldest bits. So start with more than you need, right?

And it has a distribution, some are hot, some are cold, and you pick out the cold bits. And the way they do it is they put it in a magnetic bowl. So they put it in a bowl so that you need to have enough energy to get out of the bowl. And you just let it sit there for a little while and the hot ones will get over the lip of the bowl and the cold ones will get stuck in the bottom.

And eventually, you're left with only the cold one. Gradually lower the sides of the bowl and so they can tune the temperature that they get. Cool. So that's one way to cool the sample. And then you also said they can use lasers. Yeah, they use lasers. And this is sort of mind-blowing because you imagine if you're going to cool something down, you probably shouldn't shoot it with high-energy lasers, right?

Yeah. So this is really counterintuitive. I don't know how anybody came up with this idea. But the way it works is that you shoot a laser at these atoms and you shoot a laser at them at just above the energy that they like to absorb. Remember, atoms can't just absorb any photon. They have to absorb photons of certain energies. They have this spectrum that they can jump up and down to.

So they need a photon that has exactly the right gap between the energy level they are at and the one they can go to. So if you shine an arbitrary energy laser through a gas probably won't even absorb anything. You have to sort of tune the laser to where the gas likes to drink its light. But wouldn't that make it absorb then the light? How does that make it give off energy? So what they do is they tune the laser to just above where it likes to absorb the light.

And what this means is that atoms moving towards the laser will see this laser Doppler shifted. It will change the wavelength of the light to be the one that they like to absorb. So atoms moving towards the laser will preferentially absorb this laser light, which will slow them down because they're moving towards the laser. So you pick the ones that are moving towards the light and you give them a push and that basically slows them down a little bit. Oh, and then the opposite happens for the atoms going the other way. Yes, and so what you do is you shoot laser beams at this thing

slightly above the wavelength that they should absorb and that preferentially slows down the atoms moving away from the center of the blob. Wow. It's like a quantum hack. It's really cool. It's mind-blowing. And, you know, they do absorb this and then they give off the light and so they slow back down. But they end up going in a different direction. And so you've taken a particle which was shooting towards the laser and you've modified its angle a little bit.

And that, in effect, slows it down because the overall magnitude of its velocity is now smaller. I see. It's kind of like a wall that slows an atom down, but only in one direction. Yeah, it's like you've got a bunch of sheep and you've got a dog on each side. And it's like finding the single sheep that are running away from the herd and sort of like turning them around and pushing them back in. And eventually the sheep come together and make a Bose-Einstein Condent sheep, I guess. That's such a bad joke, Daniel. All right, so the race was on to be the coolest physicist on the planet

to get the post-Einstein condesit going. And so we were at MIT and then somebody discovered these two techniques. Yes, so Dan Klepner was doing it at hydrogen with MIT, but sort of hit a wall. And then his students went out to NIST and to UC Boulder and they started a lab out there. These are Cornell and Wyman. I believe it's CU Boulder.

than you. I just want to insult the whole campus as people. Thank you. Yeah, I'm biased because I'm at the University of California, so I think of UC. And they had an idea to try heavier atoms. Instead of using hydrogen, which had this certain interaction between them that made it hard for them to stay in the magnetic trap, they said, well, let's use rubidium. Rubidium is still a boson, but it's a little heavier. And so people hadn't tried these heavier alkali atoms before. And so they made a better magnetic trap. And they had this cool idea to use really cheap lasers. Like other folks were trying to get their lasers to work and buying like a $150,000 laser systems. But, you know, this is the era when you could buy like a laser for $2 because they were in CD players, right? And DVD readers.

Laser pointers. Yeah, laser pointers. So lasers have become really cheap. And they figured out a way to use really cheap lasers and combine them in this cool way to make it very flexible but very powerful. So they're sort of like this experimental cleverness. And they were the first ones to do it. They combined this magnetic evaporation with this laser cooling. And it was in 1995 that they were able to get this thing down to 170 nanofelven. And they actually saw this Bose-Einstein condensate in their device. Wow. What did it look like? Does it look like a blob? Yeah, it looks like a blob. Can you actually see it or is it too small? You can actually see it. It looks like a blob. It's like millimeters across. It lasted for about 15 seconds. It had like 2,000 atoms in it. And you know,

what happens is it's getting colder and colder and colder. And each atom is sort of doing its own thing. And when you have a bunch of atoms doing their own thing, you get like a distribution. Like some are a little faster, some are a little slower. All of a sudden, when they cross this threshold, this temperature threshold, they all snapped into place and were all doing the same thing. Like they all had the same velocity and they were in the same place. And they acted. like one megaparticle. And you can see this in their paper. They show like, there's a blob, there's a blob, boom, there's a spike in the middle.

And that's a phase transition. That's when matters like doing something really different. That's when it clicks. That's when it clicks, yeah. The sort of tragic thing is you can see it, but the only way to see it is to shine a laser at it. This is really small and really cold. Can't just like see it with your naked eye.

So they have to shine a laser at it, which destroys it. So they can prove that it's there, but only by destroying it. man. And is that why it only lasts 15 seconds? Because you're trying to look at it at the same time? Or what's the time limit here? The time limit is just how long they can keep this thing cold and trapped. Eventually the atoms will fall out of their trap. And the way they made their magnetic bowl has a bit of a hole in the bottom. They had some, they were struggling with that a little bit. And so it was hard for them to get a lot of atoms in there and for it to last a long time. It's a leaky bowl. A little bit of a leaky bowl. But hey, they were the first ones to do it because at MIT there was a follow-up lab, a lab led by, by Wolfgang Ketterli that was sort of inheriting what Kleppner had done and also trying

to use heavier atoms. And there was a race between this lab at UC Boulder and this lab at MIT. And then also a lab at Rice University where I was happened to be an undergraduate at this very moment. Right. You were telling me you knew one of the scientists in this race trying to get it to work first. Yeah. So everybody sort of figured this out and everybody knew that like this was going to happen

and it was going to happen soon. Really? Like everyone knew that they were close to the finish line. Yeah. because they'd be giving presentations at conferences and these ideas have been sort of coalescing and these guys were the leaders in the field. And it was really about like making it work and getting it done. So the ideas were out there. Everybody knew how to do it. There were a few slightly different approaches. Like the guys at MIT had a cool way to plug the hole in the bottom

of their magnetic well using another laser. And the guys at rice were using lithium to try to get it done. And I remember at this time, because I was taking thermodynamics as a physics major, and the person teaching it was Professor Randy Hewlett. And he was engaged in this three-way race for the Nobel Prize. These three labs were all trying to make this happen at the same time. I remember specifically because he almost never showed up to class. He was off giving talks or he was in the lab. He sent his grad student or he canceled lecture. And at the time, I was like, what is this guy doing that he thinks he's so important? He was racing. He was racing to get the Nobel Prize.

He was on the clock. He was on the clock where, you know, days and weeks make a difference between winning the Nobel Prize and just being like also mentioned on the podcast years later. By one of your students that you ignored. Oh, no. But if the people at CU Boulder did it first, who got the Nobel Prize? Well, CU Boulder did it first. And then MIT did it a couple of months later. And they put out their paper, I think this is so MIT.

They put out their paper the Monday after Thanksgiving, which means they must have worked all Thanksgiving break. Oh, wow. No turkey for them. Yeah, it was a few months later, but it was a lot bigger. Like, they plugged that hole and they were able to get a lot of atoms, like, you know, many, many more atoms that lasted a lot longer than the CU Boulder one. So it was really like a big step forward in another demonstration.

And then, you know, Rice did it also in lithium, but it was later. And so they didn't get included. in the Nobel Prize. They went to MIT and CU Boulder, but Rice just got a cold gas. Well, but Rice did it. They just did it even later. And so the Nobel Prize committee said,

all right, we'll cut it off at a couple of months after the discovery. It seems a little arbitrary. It's totally arbitrary. But there is this rule about Nobel Prizes. You can only share it among three people. And so there are two PIs leading the lab at CU Boulder slash NIST and one leading the lab at MIT.

And so that was sort of a natural cutoff. Yeah. Oh, man. I know. That's a bummer. So, you know, if those grad students in the lab at Rice had just worked over Thanksgiving or given up their Christmas break or not taking vacation. Or if they didn't have to teach your class, maybe. They didn't have to grade.

They're like, oh, I almost got it. But I got to go teach this freshman physics class. I got to grade this sloppy homework, man. Can't even read this writing. It was up all night trying to decipher this kid's homework. Oh, man. So basically, Daniel, your claim to fame is that not only did you. you know the second place finisher for the both Einstein

condes that you were maybe a participant slowing this person down. I definitely had interactions with this person. No, I know Randy Hewlett. He's a great physicist and I admire him and he's a great teacher and I think it's exciting to be on the forefront and so close to the cutting edge. I do have some sympathy for being so close

and not quite being included in the upper echelon of folks who win the Nobel Prize. Yeah, I mean, it seems kind of arbitrary, right? Like, you get the Nobel Prize, you don't get the Nobel Prize, but they were all sort of in it together. Yeah, and what's really the difference between a few months here or there? I think a lot of times people in science make way too big a deal about somebody who's one day ahead or the second day. You know, it's important that everybody has done their own individual work. If somebody has published a result and you just go out and replicate it, that's not the same thing as individual independent contribution.

These are different lines of research, different ideas, different strategies, really independent efforts that were in parallel. Sure, one finished a few weeks or months ahead of the other, but they all made contributions around the same time. So in a better world, we would have recognized all of them. And think about his accomplishments. I mean, he taught you, and now here you are, teaching thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Yeah, I hope that's enough for him. He didn't get to meet the King of Sweden. He got to be talked about on my podcast. All right. Well, that was pretty exciting for such a cool topic, such a chill topic. Yeah, and so people are continuing. And now, they make Bose-Einstein condensates all the time.

They even made it once on the space station. No kidding. Like you can make a Bose-Einstein maker that you can take to space? Yeah, exactly. They put together a lab on the International Space Station that made a Bose-Einstein condensate in space, which is pretty cool. Could they also make margaritas and smoothies? Only on Fridays. And it's very cool that Bose and Einstein thought of this and that it actually came to pass.

That's pretty awesome. And now it gives us a new window, a new kind of stuff. to poke and to play with and you know now we can make these things and they last a long time so you can do things like stir them and make vortices in them and watch quantum vortices be created and overlap them and launch them into each other and see interference effects on macroscopic objects so you can recreate a lot of the cool quantum mechanical experiments that used to only work on tiny invisible microscopic particles now you can do them on macroscopic blobs of stuff wow that's pretty amazing so are there any other states of matter we should be looking out for or that we might discover in the future? You know, there are lots of other states of matter that people theorize about, you know, tetrachorks and hexacorks and all sorts of weird combinations because matter is complex and it has lots of really complicated interactions. And in various configurations and pressure and density, you know, you can do all sorts of weird

stuff. Like we talked about quark matter and strange matter, you know, what might happen in the core of a neutron star. And I'm sure there are lots of things we haven't even imagined. one day I hope we'll discover something before we think about it. So we'll have a triumph for experimental physics rather than just for theoretical physics. Cool. And maybe somebody out there listening could be the person to discover this new state of matter. That's right. There's lots more to discover, lots more weird kinds of goo that we can make matter to do.

And hopefully you'll start a lab and zap matter into doing something weird. Yeah. And then chill out. With your Nobel Prize and your Margarita. And or your silver Nobel Prize. What did you call it? That's right. Plywood Nobel Prize. Plywood.

Not as valuable, but very tough. It's very hardy. That's right. Yeah. And it's got the description written in a Sharpie. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. And we hope that you joined this amazing race to discover new kinds of matters.

And thanks for listening. If you're interested in hearing more about this kind of stuff, please send us a suggestion to questions at Danielonhorpe.com. And come interact with us. We're on Twitter at Daniel and Jorge, where we answer questions and make jokes. So come and check us out. Thanks for joining us.

See you next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my...

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