Friday, 21 October 2016

Otober 21 is reserved to Wolfgang Ketterle


Otober 21 is reserved to Wolfgang Ketterle
Wolfgang Ketterle was born today in 1957 in Heidelberg, West Germany. After earning his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Ketterle began working at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.

In 1995, the team he was leading was one of the first to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and provided some of the earliest studies on the substances. For this work he was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, who led the group that was the first to create a BEC). He has continued to study the behavior of supercold atoms, creating the first molecular BEC in 2003 and demonstrating high temperature superfluidity in a fermionic condensate.

What is BEC? you ask
The Bose-Einstein condensate is a phase of matter formed by bosons to a close temperature of absolute zero. Under these conditions, a large fraction of atoms reaches the lowest quantum state, and in these conditions the quantum effects can be observed on a macroscopic scale.

The existence of this state of matter as a consequence of quantum mechanics was first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1925, following the work done by Satyendra Nath Bose. The first such condensate was produced seventy years later by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nK (nano Kelvin) MERRY birthday for the Nobel Prize Wolfgang Ketterle born in 1957 in Heidelberg, West Germany.

Bio:
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2001/ketterle-bio.html

Reference:
https://www.reference.com/science/bose-einstein-condensate-32e9326e91cc8b48

#history   #physics   #BEC   #science

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