Bose-Einstein Condensate The 5th State of Matter.

States of Matter

Many of us will know that there are 4 primary natural states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and plasma each having their own chemical properties.

Solid — definite volume and shape

Liquid — definite volume but fills any unoccupied space

Gas — no definite volume or shape

Plasma — have no definite shape or volume, electrons have been stripped away and left with positive ions.

But what If I told you that there was so much more to this concept of matter. The 4 states of matter that have been mentioned above are ones that we see in our everyday lives (plasma less so)

There are states called modern states, these states cant be seen in our natural world as of yet but with the help of highly sophisticated technology, atomic physicists have been able to replicate these, most popular being the Bose-Einstein condensate (funny name right). This modern state right here is considered in the atomic world as the fifth state of matter, you can only find this state at extremely low temperatures, approximately 1 billionth of a degree above absolute 0 (-273.5 °C), and at that you will only be able to see it for an extremely small amount of time, around 15 seconds.

What are Bose-Einstein Condensates?

This so called “super state” isn’t like the other states of matter where they seem to be regular atoms, when as gas gets cooled it turns into a liquid the particles get slower and more uniform, when a liquid gets cooled it turns into a solid and the particles get slower and get more uniform, though when a Bose-Einstein condensate is created the particles don’t stop completely , something very strange happens wen you reach extremely lower temperatures approximately 170nK. Before you get to that low temperatures the particles do change into waves, and as you get lower and lower those waves start to get longer and longer and when you reach that 170nK mark, the waves start to overlap, this is when the particles go through some sort of “identity crisis” they don’t know what they are so instead of particles or waves they turn into a mess due to the fact that the particles have lost their sense of being, they don’t know which wave or which particle they are.

How is the Bose-Einstein condensate created?

In the past around the 1990’s world record low temperatures weren’t cold enough to create this super state so there was to be a new creative way to produce this feat of science, and to this Eric Cornell’s team found a way, it was called “evaporative cooling”. What happens is that a group of atoms are put into the middle chamber, (this is usually done in space to prevent gravity from effecting this) and a laser are shone all around the outside of this group of atoms, this allows for the atoms to slow down until the become very slow and very cold, but this is still not cold enough to create the “identity crisis” of the atoms (many physicists have reached up till this point but have failed to get colder) so to get colder, the lasers are turned off and a very strong magnetic field is turned on which catch the atoms and then they let the hotter, more energetic atoms just slip out of the magnetic field, just leaving them with the very cold atoms, them the atoms just sit in the magnetic field to reach the extremely cold temperatures required to create what is known as “the 5th state of matter”

The History of the Bose-Einstein Condensate

The Bose-Einstein Condensate was a state first though of by an Indian physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose, the same person who discovered the subatomic particle, bosons (1894–1974). While working on statistical problems in quantum mechanics, he made this intriguing discovery which he sent to Albert Einstein, who agreed with him and thought that this was important enough to get published.

So who created the first of this so called “super states”, well as I mentioned before, this state isn’t something that you find in your backyard, in fact the first sighting of the particle was only in 1995 by a group consisting of Eric Cornell (left), Wolfgang Ketterle (middle) and Carl Weinman (right), this had won them the Nobel prize in physics in 2001, not only for creating the first “super state” but also for proving Einstein wrong, yes Einstein was wrong. In his 1925 paper regarding these Bose-Einstein condensates, he concluded that the theory provided a paradox and it “appears to be as good as impossible.”