Next: Cold and ultracold collisions
The collision of two very slowly moving atoms is completely
different to the billiard ball physics of the human-scale world.
The correct description, quantum mechanics, makes it possible for
strange things to occur - atoms may behave like waves and can
interfere.
We have created a collider experiment, similar to those used to
smash particles together at light speed, but where the atoms move
so slowly that the wave effects are revealed. By varying the
collision speed, striking changes in the directions that atoms are
scattered were observed. In the experiment two clouds of Rubidium
atoms were cooled to the nanoKelvin regime and accelerated towards
each other using magnetic fields. The particles scattered in the
collision were directly imaged using laser light, and the observed
scattering patterns could be interpreted as the quantum
interference of exactly two waves. Such interference patterns
illuminate the fine details on how atoms interact.
Click
here
to download a movie of the cold collision of two ultracold atomic
Rubidium clouds.
Next: Cold and ultracold collisions
Up: A Collider for Ultracold Atoms
Previous: A Collider for Ultracold Atoms
nk
2004-11-02
