Follow-up on first atom laser

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@ix.netcom.com>]

The following article proivides additional information on the first 
atom laser and what steps led to its development. This is a 
fascinating breakthrough and has significant potential.
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 CAMBRIDGE, Mass.  - Massachusetts Institute of  Technology 
scientists Monday unveiled the first atom laser -- a device that 
fires atoms in a way that is similar to a light laser.   ``In the 
60s, the emphasis was on controlling light,  focusing it, and that 
led to the laser,'' said Marc-Oliver Mewes, MIT researcher and 
co-author of the studies that will appear this week in Science 
magazine and the research journal Physical Review Letters. 
  ``No one knew at the time what purposes that laser would  
serve, but now lasers are used in CD-players, cash registers, 
precision manufacturing, even for medical applications,'' he 
said. ``This discovery is just like that. It allows you to 
control an atomic beam, the atom, the basic structure of 
things.'' 
  Mewes said the uses for atom lasers, in which ``the atoms  
are marching in lockstep just as light does in a laser,'' are 
not all known, but he suggested that in time they could be used 
to create much finer patterns in computer chips and improve the 
precision of atomic clocks that serve as the basis for global 
positioning navigational systems. 
  A very important intermediate step toward the atom laser was  
the creation of a new form of matter -- the Bose-Einstein 
Condensate (BEC), which forms at extremely low temperatures of 
about a millionth of a degree above abolute zero Kelvin, said 
the leader of the MIT team, Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle. 
  Producing BEC involved creating a magnetic trap to keep the  
atoms closely packed. The tricky part was to allow some of atoms to
escape without losing the whole pack, Ketterle said. 
 The MIT group was able to do this by applying an oscillating  
magnetic field to the trapped BEC, which allowed some of the 
atoms to escape. The new laser emits multiple pulses of 
Bose-condensed droplets, Ketterle said, adding, ``It looks just 
like a dripping faucet.'' 
 Ketterle's team produced its first pulse in mid-November and  
was able to photograph it. ``It is a primitive laser,'' he 
said. ``For example it only works in a pulsed mode, but we are 
already planning several improvements.'' 
 ``It's one of those rare times in physics when you discover a  
really new effect,'' Mewes said. ``It makes you feel kind of 
strange -- you're seeing something that nobody else has ever 
seen before.'' 

Sandy Perle
Technical Director
ICN Dosimetry Division
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