An atom laser that produces a beam of matter with a precise fixed frequency could eventually lead to a new generation of ultra-sensitive navigation devices.
The laser overcomes some of the problems that have plagued atoms lasers since they were first built in the late 1990s.
Atom lasers do with matter what conventional lasers have done with photons since the 1950s – produce a bright beam of coherent waves. This is possible because the wave-particle duality of matter means that atoms have an associated wavelength that can be manipulated in a similar way to light waves. In theory, it should be possible to produce a beam of atoms with a single precise frequency, in which all the atoms march in step.
In 1997, Wolfgang Ketterle and colleagues at MIT in the US, created the first atom laser by cooling a group of atoms to such an extent that their wave-like states overlap – a so-called "Bose Einstein Condensate". The team then used a magnetic field to extract atoms, creating a beam......
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