Eric Cornell

  • A single impurity (shown as a round ball) entering a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) creates excitations.
    Newly minted Ph.D. Ming-Guang Hu and his colleagues in the Jin and Cornell groups recently investigated immersing an impurity in a quantum bath consisting of a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. The researchers expected the strong impurity-boson interactions to 鈥渄ress鈥 the impurity, i.e., cause it to get bigger and heavier. In the experiment, dressing the impurity resulted in it becoming a quasi particle called a Bose polaron.
  • Illustration of Rubidium atoms "breathing" endlessly in the Top Trap.
    It took Eric Cornell three years to build JILA鈥檚 first Top Trap with his own two hands in the lab. The innovative trap relied primarily on magnetic fields and gravity to trap ultracold atoms. In 1995, Cornell and his colleagues used the Top Trap to make the world鈥檚 first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), an achievement that earned Cornell and Carl Wieman the Nobel Prize in 2001.
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