MIT physicists demonstrate first atom laser

17 Jun 2002

Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists Monday unveiled the first atom laser -- a device that fires atoms in a way that is similar to a light laser.Uses for atom lasers, in which "the atoms are marching in lockstep just as light does in a laser," are not all known, according to Marc-Oliver Mewes, MIT researcher and co-author of the studies that will appear this week in Science magazine and the research journal Physical Review Letters. Mewes suggested that in time they could be used to create much finer patterns in computer chips and improve the precision of atomic clocks that serve as the basis for global positioning navigational systems.

An important intermediate step toward the atom laser was the creation of a new form of matter -- the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), which forms at extremely low temperatures of about a millionth of a degree above abolute zero Kelvin, said the leader of the MIT team, Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle.

Producing BEC involved creating a magnetic trap to keep the atoms closely packed. The tricky part was to allow some of atoms to escape without losing the whole pack, Ketterle said. The MIT group was able to do this by applying an oscillating magnetic field to the trapped BEC, which allowed some of the atoms to escape. The new laser emits multiple pulses of Bose-condensed droplets, Ketterle said. "It looks just like a dripping faucet," he said.