Seeing Coldest Blobs in the Universe in New Light
An illustration of a "super-photon" created when physicists turned photons of light into a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Credit: Jan Klaers, University of Bonn Physicists have come up with a new way to gaze longingly at some of the weirdest matter on Earth — the super-cold, super-calm gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate. While scientists have been able to steal quick glimpses of the unusual gas, until now, simply snapping a picture of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) often destroyed it by adding extra energy from light. "The absorption of a single photon (the smallest packet of light) is enough to break one," lead study author Michael Hush, a physicist at the University of Nottingham, told LiveScience in an email interview. [ Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature ] By creating a new computer model, detailed today (Nov. 28) in the New Journal of Physics, the researchers have figured out a way to re-route this heat and ke...
