Extreme Superatoms

by : Aria Ratmandanu

       Superfluids, superconductors and supersolids owe their bizarre behaviour to the formation of a sort of superatom inside them, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

       But might it be possible to create such a state outside a liquid or solid ? It took researchers many years, but in 1995 a team at the University of Colorado and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, both based in Boulder, finally succeeded in coaxing a gas of rubidium into a BEC, its lowest possible quantum state. The breakthrough won team leaders Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell, together with Wolfgang Ketterle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the 2001 Nobel prize for physics. 

         When Wieman and Cornell made their condensate, their lab briefly became home to the coldest place in the universe, just 20 nanokelvin above absolute zero. It wasn't the only BEC in the cosmos, though, even discounting superfluid or superconductor experiments that may have been taking place at exactly the same time. 

        In 2011, the Chandra X-ray telescope showed that the core of a neutron star called Cassiopeia A, which lies 11,000 light years away from Earth, is a superfluid. One teaspoon of neutron star material weighs six billion tonnes and the intense pressure from the outer layers is enough to Yet, despite the name, the core of a neutron star isn't exclu sively made of neutrons, it contains a portion of protons too which also form a BEC. You can think of this as a superfluid or, because the protons carry electrical charge, a superconductor.