Juggling Ultra-Cold Atoms

If the atoms in a gas are cooled until the temperature is very close to absolute zero, they begin to lose their independent physical characteristics. When measured, it’s as though they were all marching in the same direction in closed ranks, acting as a single supermolecule.

In 2001, German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle received the Nobel Prize for being the first to create Bose-Einstein condensation. Immanuel Bloch has now taken things a step further. He has become the first to crack the Bose-Einstein condensation wave and regularly arrange several hundred of these special atoms into a glowing grid. In the future, grids like these could make up the basic elements of a new kind of supercomputer. These ‘quantum computers’, should they become viable, would be able to calculate complex mathematical equations at a rate that would make today’s computers look slow and clumsy in comparison.