I’m lecturing to our first-year seminar today about Bose-Einstein Condensation, using slides that haven’t been updated since 2002. Given the pace of research in the field, that’s a little crazy, so I spent a good while last night looking at pretty pictures on the Ketterle group web site, among others, so I can report on the latest and greatest developments, or at least that subset of the latest and greatest that I think I can boil down to one slide targeted at college frosh.
Coincidentally, the AIP news feed is also highlighting recent results from the Ketterle group, citing three new results:
1. First direct observation of phase separation between a fluid and a superfluid.
2. First observation of Mott insulator shells.
3. First fermion superfluidity observed in an optical lattice.
That’s three impressive results, just in the past year. My only quibble would be that I think I remember Dan Heinzen reporting something similar to #2 a couple of years ago at DAMOP, but Wolfgang is an honest guy, so I’m sure there’s something new and dramatic about the observation. I’ll be downloading the papers today, and we’ll see what’s up.
There’s a joke in physics circles that once somebody wins the Nobel Prize, they never do anything important again. (A more extreme version holds that Nobel laureates go completely wacky…) When Bill Phillips won a share of the prize for laser cooling, I remember somebody working on BEC remarking “Now we need to get them to give one to Wolfgang Ketterle, so the rest of us can catch up.”
Ketterle got a share of the 2001 Nobel for BEC, and it hasn’t even slowed him down. That group is really one of the most impressive operations in atomic physics. They turn out one amazing result after another, year in and year out.
(The Nobel hasn’t significantly slowed the productivity of Eric Cornell or Bill Phillips, either. As jinxes go, Alfred Nobel is no John Madden…)
You refer, perhaps, to the other Josephson effect…
yeah, but Ketterle does have a nasty habit of saying he was first even if he wasn’t. For the BEC of molecules he (mostly his group but also him) rubbished Jin and Grimm. And Bloch has seen this Mott Insulator stuff for a while. It seems that Ketterle has a much easier job of getting papers accepted than others.
Ketterle does have a nasty habit of saying he was first even if he wasn’t. For the BEC of molecules he (mostly his group but also him) rubbished Jin and Grimm. And Bloch has seen this Mott Insulator stuff for a while.
I’m not aware of Ketterle making any claims to be first at something that aren’t strictly true. He does occasionally announce the first observation of something or another in a way that lets media outlets draw incorrect conclusions, but what he says is always scrupulously correct.
In the case of paper #2 above, what they are reporting is the first direct imaging of the concentric shell structure in a BEC above the Mott insulator transition in an optical lattice. There are wells in the center of the lattice with exactly five atoms per site, surrounded by a shell of wells with exactly four atoms per site, and another with three, and so on. Ketterle has found a way to take pictures of specific shells, and directly see this structure.
Bloch’s group was the first to report observing the Mott Insulator transition in an optical lattice, but did not directly measure the number distribution. Dan Heinzen reported a couple of years ago on a photo-associative technique that allowed him to determine what fraction of the atoms were in doubly occupied wells. Neither of them directly measured the concentric shell structure, though (you can infer it from the stuff Heinzen did, but not see it directly).
It’s a very nice paper, and the claims they make are all absolutely correct, as far as I can see (and this is a sub-field I follow moderately closely, as I did BEC-in-lattices work as a post-doc). It’s also hyped more effectively than those other projects, but I think the credit for that goes partly to MIT, which has an extremely well-oiled media machine.
There’s no denying that Ketterle has a real gift for selling his work. I’m not aware of any situations in which he’s done anything that crosses the line between effective public relations and unethical behavior, though.