IBM Research Developed a Method for Bose-Einstein Condensate Production Using a Polymer Film

Bose-Einstein condensate is an aggregate state of matter predicted and described by the Indian physicist Shatendranath Bose and Albert Einstein as early as the mid-20s of the last century. However, for the first time, Bose condensate was obtained experimentally only in 1995. Physicists Eric Cornell, Karl Wiemann and Wolfgang Ketterle received the Nobel Prize for this. They managed to obtain condensate from rubidium and sodium atoms cooled to several dozen nano-Kelvin. In 2010, condensate was obtained from photons, and at room temperature.



On December 8 of this year, a group of scientists from the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich published a paper that describes a method for producing such condensate using a film of luminescent polymer, similar to that used in OLED displays. This significantly reduces the cost of the process and brings the prospect of industrial use of Bose-Einstein condensate-based optoelectronic devices in high-performance computing. Earlier, ultrapure crystals were needed to produce condensate.



What is so interesting about Bose-Einstein condensate?

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The substance enters the Bose-Einstein condensate state, when all its particles with the whole spin, that is, the bosons, are in the same lowest possible quantum state. At the same time, they begin to behave like one giant superparticle with quantum properties. The phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity are directly related to this state of matter and thus can serve as examples of the manifestation of quantum effects in the macroworld. For a photon Bose condensate, the consequence of the fact that all its photons are in the same state is the coherence of the light emitted by it. That is, on the basis of such condensate, you can create lasers and optical switches, and much more efficient than existing today.



IBM Research scientists used the installation in the form of two mirrors with a gap width of the order of a micrometer, in which a 35-nm-thick polymer film was placed, to obtain a Bose condensate. After the polymer is excited by a laser beam, exciton polaritons , quasiparticles, arising from the interaction of photons with medium excitations, are formed on its surface. More details about the Bose condensation of exciton polaritons can be read in Russian in this article (PDF 2 MB).



A new method of obtaining Bose condensate can form the basis of the element base of optical microchips, which will be many times faster and more economical than conventional semiconductor ones. IBM has long been engaged in the development of optical and hybrid optoelectronic devices that will be able to meet the need for processing peta- and exabytes of data.