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Page created: 04/01/06
Last updated: 16/06/08
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Ultra Cold Atom Group
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According
to the Guinness Book of Records, the coldest place ever created
by humankind is inside a remarkable cloud of atoms, known as a
Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Such condensates contain millions of
atoms, which behave as a single “super atom” approximately a million
times larger than normal, but still less than a tenth of a millimetre
across. Their existence was first predicted by Einstein and Bose in
1924. But it took 70 years to develop the refrigeration techniques
required to actually make a condensate by cooling atoms to within a few
billionths of a degree of the lowest possible temperature. This
achievement led to the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 and
2001 and opens a vast new research field involving the condensates
themselves and their connections with other areas ranging in scale from
particle physics and nano-science to cosmology.
The Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) and the Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have announced the award of
more than five and a quarter million pounds, jointly to the University
of Nottingham and the University of Birmingham, to establish the
Midlands Ultracold Atom Research Centre. The centre will form a
national centre of excellence for research in the physics of ultracold
atoms. The centre will house six members of academic staff who will be
experimentalists as well as the existing theoretical activities in the
two institutions.
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