If you bottle up a gas and try to image its atoms using today’s most powerful microscopes, you will see little more than a shadowy blur. Atoms zip around at lightning speeds and are difficult to pin down at ambient temperatures.
If, however, these atoms are plunged to ultracold temperatures, they slow to a crawl, and scientists can start to study how they can form exotic states of matter, such as superfluids, superconductors, and quantum magnets.
Physicists at MIT have now cooled a gas of potassium atoms to several nanokelvins — just a hair above absolute zero — and trapped the atoms within a two-dimensional sheet of an optical lattice created by crisscrossing lasers. Using a high-resolution microscope, the researchers took images of the cooled atoms residing in the lattice.
By looking at correlations between the atoms’ positions in hundreds of such images, the team observed individual atoms interacting in some rather peculiar ways, based on their position in the lattice. Some atoms exhibited “antisocial” behavior and kept away from each other, while some bunched together with alternating magnetic orientations. Others appeared to piggyback on each other, creating pairs of atoms next to empty spaces, or holes.
The team believes that these spatial correlations may shed light on the origins of superconducting behavior. Superconductors are remarkable materials in which electrons pair up and travel without friction, meaning that no energy is lost in the journey. If superconductors can be designed to exist at room temperature, they could initiate an entirely new, incredibly efficient era for anything that relies on electrical power.
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