Hey! That's me, yep. It's a combination of a BEC and a Rydberg atom called "Rydberg polaron". This isn't the scientifically deepest article I've written, but if you want to read a more detailed description, feel free to check out the sources at the bottom.
Since the end of the 30 day residency in November, I and a few other participants have been posting weekly, so I've got a decent back catalogue and there will be more to come!
Not only Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a textbook topic in condensed-matter physics, but also Rydberg atoms, which are a very weird phenomenon that has been mostly studied recently as a sort of edge-case where quantum physics starts to look like classical physics.
> So in 2018, an international team of scientists created a BEC out of strontium atoms, and hit one of those atoms with a carefully tuned laser, exciting its outermost electron and turning it into a Rydberg atom. Several other atoms from the BEC were caught within between that outer electron’s inflated orbital.
This is not so much putting 170 atoms in one, but inflating one beyond the size of its 170-atom neighbourhood.
The outer orbital is being treated as the last layer of an onion and the atoms are "inside" that. But orbitals are not spherical so our geometrical intuitions kinda fail.
So I thought of a nice question: how close-in does the hydrogen in Rubidium Hydride sit. For gaseous RbH and thinking in solid spheres instead of clouds:
The bond length of RbH is ~4.5 units.
The Hydrogen proton is *inside* the empty 5s radius (~4.7 units).
If we added an electron ("an antibonding electron") it would go into the 5s orbital. But that stretches the bond making the distance between the nuclei ~4.8 units.
In RbH, the Rb atom gives up its single outer 5s electron to the H atom, so there is no populated 5s electron shell in a Rubidium Hydride molecule.
A little bit of hand waving, but I don't mind it much. A cloud of steam rising from a boiling pot doesn't have a well defined border or consistent shape, but a human looking at a nearby object can usually make a clear and reasonable decision about whether or not that object is "inside" the steam cloud.
From a position of naivety, anything relating to electron dissociation sounds potentially useful for nano-components to use for computation, or for superconductivity?
Honestly, no. These weird states of matter have extremely different properties to ordinary matter. Weird properties is how we get things like superconductors, magnets, semiconductors, photovoltaics.. so strange state of matter with weird properties could very well produce some magic
as a naive , it is non-intuitive for me how the lower bound is 0 kelvin, is this the temp where things truly stops oscillating (quantum level) or we just dont care .
All fields have a zero point energy/ground state energy they cannot go below. So, no they won't stop. The Heidelberg uncertainty principle also disallowes zero momentum and a fixed position.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 2.5 ms ] threadI found it a bit more interesting that the author's middle name is Galileo, and that he is participating in a "blogging" residency [0]:
Inkhaven residency: A 30 day residency for you to grow as a writer. For one month, you'll publish a blogpost every day. Or pack your bags.
[0]: https://www.inkhaven.blog/
Since the end of the 30 day residency in November, I and a few other participants have been posting weekly, so I've got a decent back catalogue and there will be more to come!
This is not so much putting 170 atoms in one, but inflating one beyond the size of its 170-atom neighbourhood.
The outer orbital is being treated as the last layer of an onion and the atoms are "inside" that. But orbitals are not spherical so our geometrical intuitions kinda fail.