Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have for the first time engineered and detected the presence of high angular momentum collisions between atoms at temperatures close to absolute zero. Previous experiments with ultracold atoms featured essentially head-on collisions. The JQI experiment, by contrast, is able to create more complicated collisions between atoms using only lasers. This innovation may facilitate the creation of exotic quantum states that can be exploited for practical applications like quantum computing. The key to the JQI approach is to alter the atoms' environment with laser light. They "dress" rubidium atoms by bathing them in a pair of laser beams, which force the atoms to have one of three discrete values of momentum. In the JQI experiment, rubidium atoms comprise a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). BECs have been collided before. But the observation of high-angular-momentum scattering at such low energies is new.
The new JQI results are being reported in Science magazine online (Science Express) December 8, 2011. The paper includes a variety of technical issues which will require some explanation.
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