Bose-Einstein Condensate: On a chip

The Evil Dwarf from Hell writes "This week's Nature has an article (paid subscription required) by a team that has created a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) using an "atom chip". The chip suspends atoms over the surface using various fields and allows them to be moved from one location to another. A couple of advantages are relaxed contraints on the vacuum and increased speed of BEC formation (down to less than 1 second). (A quickie is available on Physics News Update). This goes with a news story in last weeks Science about 1d and 2d BECs. (A search on arXiv.org gives 167 hits in the last year for BECs)."

Timothy beat you to it, Hemos.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/04/226201 &mode=thread [slashdot.org]

Unbelievable!

[roman_mir]

What they can do with this thing - imagine a computer microprocessor that does not use electricity to send 1/0 signals, instead a directed atomic chain can be provoked to push a signal as a wave that goes through some hard material. I don't know if it would make sence for computing though. But what interests me is can this technique be used to send shock waves through non uniformly distributed types of matter (sending a shock wave through the planet in order to communicate with somebody at a specific geographic location could be a very interesting encryption or more like a steganography solution.) With enough energy -create seismographic shifts (earthquaqes.)