Physicists have created an atomic laser that can work forever

As a result, it is possible to create atomic lasers with coherent matter waves. Now the Amsterdam team

physicists said that it is possible to make these waves of matter persist.

The concept behind the atomic laser is the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC for short.

There are two types of elementary particles in nature:fermions and bosons. Fermions, particles like electrons and quarks, are the building blocks of the matter that makes us up. Bosons are very different in nature: they are not hard, like fermions, but soft: for example, they can pass through each other without problems. 

The most famous example of a boson is the photon- the minimum unit of light. But particles of matter can also combine to form bosons—in fact, entire atoms can behave exactly like particles of light. In addition, all bosons can be in the same state at the same time. In technical terms, they can condense into a coherent wave.

When this type of condensation occurs with particles of matter, physicists refer to the resulting matter as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Now a team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has been able to create a continuous Bose-Einstein condensate. 

Florian Schreck, team leader, explains inwhat was the trick? Previously, all atoms were cooled in one place, but in the new installation the team distributed the cooling stages not by time, but by space. 

"We make the atoms move as they passsuccessive cooling steps. Eventually, ultracold atoms get to the center of the experiment, where they can be used to form coherent matter waves in a Bose-Einstein condensate. But while these atoms are being used, new atoms are already replenishing the condensate. In this way, we can continue this process, essentially, forever,” he confirmed.

As soon as lasers can not only workforever, but also to generate stable beams, they will be actively used in the creation of technology. Matter-based lasers are expected to play as important a role in technology as conventional lasers do today.

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