A “laser” that puts out a continuous beam of coherent atoms is one step closer, say physicists in the Netherlands, who have devised a new way of cooling atoms to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).
A BEC is a distinctive state of matter in which all atoms are in the same quantum state. Therefore, a beam of atoms drawn from a BEC will behave as a coherent matter wave – in much the same way as light from a laser is a coherent electromagnetic wave.
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