Abstract:

On October 9, 2001 the Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced the Nobel Prize winners in Physics. The most prestigious scientific award went to Eric A. Cornell (JILA), Wolfgang Ketterle (MIT), and Carl E. Wieman (JILA) "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

In the July 14, 1995 issue of Science magazine, researchers from JILA reported achieving a temperature far lower than had ever been produced before and creating an entirely new state of matter predicted decades ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. This discovery was made possible by the combination of magnetic atom traps (to hold a small number of atoms in place) and laser cooling (to cool those atoms to near absolute zero).

I will talk about the work done together with Professor Paul Roberts, in which we used some forms of nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLSE) to elucidate different aspects of condensate behavior: the motion, interactions, nucleation and reconnections of vortex lines, rings and loops; the motion of impurities; superfluid turbulence and the capture of impurities by vortex lines.