I created Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) - SO CAN YOU!

Now here is something interesting - at least it was to me. Back when I was in school, we learned that matter had three states it could be in: solid, liquid, gas. That's it. Then I find out that plasma is a thing. Apparently it has been around since the 1950's and recognized as a fundamental sate of matter since them. Hm. Now there is a new kid on the block, what they (who are they?) are calling the 5th fundamental state of matter - Bose-Einstein Condensate. More on that in a second, I just have to spin up a quick side bar to give a shout out to plasma because of something I learned from Google:

"Plasma is one of the four common states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas that is created when one or more electrons are torn free from a gas atom. Plasma is the highest energy state of matter consisting of a collection of free-moving electrons, positive ions and neutral particles. It is electrically conductive and responds to magnetic fields.

Plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe, making up 99% of all matter. Most of the matter in the Sun and other stars exists in a plasma state. Plasma can also be created artificially by humans, such as in fluorescent lights and neon lights."

99% of all matter in the universe eh? Look at plasma.

Okay, back to this BEC business. Turns out, this guy Einstein, working with Satyendra Bose discovered something. It's kind of the opposite of plasma (being the highest energy state of matter). BEC is looooooooow energy.

Here is the Wikipedia page for BEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate

But I have to say, Wikipedia is not the best place, at least for me, to learn much of anything sciencey. It seems they assume you have a PhD in whatever science related thing you are looking up. Sometimes its okay but only if you are already like mid level in whatever it is you are looking up.

Instead, lets rely on my good'ole pal ChatGPT 4. I asked it "What is Bose Einstein Condensate" and here is what it gave me:

As a reminder, here are the elementary particles:

I guess ChatGPT was right, all the [gauge] bosons do all have "integer spin" as you can see.

Okay, enough dilly dallying, here is the cool part. I saw one of my favorite YouTubers, Anastasia Marchenkova, had a video (see below) about BEC and next thing you know, I was on the Oqtant web site and spinning up my own job to make my very own BEC. I won't go over the steps here because it is all in this video - step by step. One caveat is the system(s) is offline from time to time so, you may have to wait a while during which your job will be queued up to run but, totally worth it.

Oqtant web site where you can get started

Below are some pictures of the results of my lil condensate.

Some jargon/acronyms:

TOF - Time of Flight

MOT - Magneto-Optical Trap

Rb - stands for Rubidium atoms - Rubidium it is a chemical element with atomic number 37, an atomic mass of 85.47, and a density of 1.53 Mg/m3. It's a soft, whitish-gray solid in the alkali metal group, similar to potassium and caesium. Rubidium has a melting point of 38.9°C and boils at 688°C.

Rb atoms are what is used to create this jazz.

Following the YouTube video above, you can make your own BEC. You can create the job and it will be in the queue till "the system" comes back online which will be about two weeks from today (today being 4/4/24).

Where else can you get 500 Million Rb atoms for free and have them cooled down on your behalf to 80 nano-kelvin - one small fraction of a degree above absolute 0. Again, per ChatGPT answer above absolute zero is -459.67 Fahrenheit or -273.15 Celsius. F/C I think makes more sense to most folks than the kelvin scale. BTW, absolute zero in kelvin is 0.

Interesting fact, deep, DEEP black space is about -455 degrees F which is really cold but still a few degrees F above absolute 0. So, when your experiment runs, you will be creating one of the coldest places in the entire universe. Well, Oqtant will be doing that on your behalf, but you get what I mean. Pretty cool.

As they say in the video, if you had to do this experiment at home, you'd be looking at about 5 million dollars US to set it up and run it. Big thanks to Oqtant for providing the ability to create this BEC and having it open to anyone and everyone. And big thanks to the awesome Anastasia Marchenkova for introducing her subscribers to this cool experiment. If you are interested enough to still be reading this, then you HAVE to follow/subscribe to her on YouTube, Instagram and X. She will blow you away with Quantum-everything. She can jam an hour's worth of content into 10 minutes - trust me, you'll see.

Pictures of the condensate from Oqtant web site:

Give it a go!