Home page > Research Teams > Bose-Einstein Condensates
Bose-Einstein Condensates
The manipulation of atoms using laser light has constituted one of the major achievements of atomic physics and quantum optics for the last twenty years. This research field has had a very deep impact on many aspects of AMO physics, from metrology to collision physics, including also statistical physics and matter wave interferometry.
Since the discovery of sub-Doppler cooling in 1988, the search for effects related to quantum degeneracy has become one of the major goals of the field. Thanks to the development of evaporative cooling which comes in addition to laser cooling, it is now possible to reach situations such that the interparticle distance is of the order of or smaller than the de Broglie wavelength 
, where 
is the particle mass and 
the gas temperature (
and 
are the Planck and Boltzmann constants).
Effects related to the statistical nature of the particles are then spectacular. If the particles are bosons (integer spin), one observes the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation. This leads to the realization of coherent assemblies of particles, described by a single macroscopic wave function. During these last years, the activity of our team has been essentially devoted to the experimental and theoretical understanding of the properties of these ultracold quantum gases.
