By PHILIP ENGLISH
Some of the aura surrounding the Nobel Prize is rubbing off on physics department researchers at Otago University.
The department is celebrating the win of the Nobel Prize for physics by three colleagues in America - Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle - all friends or collaborators of
the University of Otago researchers.
The prize winners and the Otago team are among a small band of researchers investigating the properties of a new form of matter - not solid, liquid or gas - whose properties could lead to the use of atom lasers in the construction of minute motors, machines or tools for medicine.
The American researchers won this year's prize for physics for discovering the new state of matter.
Dr Andrew Wilson of the University of Otago physics department said the first laser was demonstrated nearly 40 years ago in a scientific breakthrough that provided the best control over light that nature allowed. "For example, light from a laser travels in one direction whereas light from a bulb goes in all directions," he said. "Light from a laser is one colour, whereas light from a bulb is a mixture of colours."
He said lasers provided order or cohesion. The work of the three American scientists had been reproduced in Otago with Government grants of $2.9 million since 1996.
The new kind of matter, known as Bose-Einstein condensate, offered a new way to produce a beam of atoms in much the same way as an ordinary laser produced a beam of light.
Dr Wilson said the Otago researchers were among only a few to extract atoms from Bose-Einstein condensate in the form of a coherent atomic beam. New Zealand research formed an important part of the international effort.
"When fully developed, atom lasers will provide researchers with atom sources as different as lasers are from candlelight," he said.
