{"id":758,"date":"2006-10-27T10:34:13","date_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/27\/defying-the-nobel-prize-jinx\/"},"modified":"2006-10-27T10:34:13","modified_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:34:13","slug":"defying-the-nobel-prize-jinx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/27\/defying-the-nobel-prize-jinx\/","title":{"rendered":"Defying the Nobel Prize Jinx"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, the AIP news feed is also highlighting recent results from the Ketterle group<\/a>, citing three new results:<\/p>\n

\n

1. First direct observation of phase separation between a fluid and a superfluid.<\/p>\n

2. First observation of Mott insulator shells.<\/p>\n

3. First fermion superfluidity observed in an optical lattice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(The Nobel hasn’t significantly slowed the productivity of Eric Cornell or Bill Phillips, either. As jinxes go, Alfred Nobel is no John Madden<\/a>…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading Defying the Nobel Prize Jinx<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}