SATYENDRA NATH BOSE - SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

News: 129th birth anniversary of Satyendra Nath Bose: a look at the scientist’s contributions

 

What's in the news?

       When a relatively unknown Kolkata-born teacher called Satyendra Nath Bose wrote a letter to Albert Einstein in 1924 about his breakthrough in quantum mechanics, nobody knew he was going to make history.

 

Key takeaways:

       Satyendra Nath Bose had derived Planck’s law for black body radiation (which refers to the spectrum of light emitted by any hot object) without any reference to classical electrodynamics.

       Bose asked Einstein to review his research paper and, if he found it important enough, get it published.

       Today, in honour of his legacy, any particle that obeys the Bose-Einstein statistics is called a boson.

 

Bose-Einstein Statistics:

       The Standard Physics Model provides four natural states of matter such as Solids, liquids, gases and plasma.

       The fifth state is the man-made Bose-Einstein condensates.

 

About Bose-Einstein condensate:

       A Bose-Einstein condensate is so named because its existence was posited almost a century ago by Albert Einstein and Indian mathematician Satyendra Nath Bose.

       This exotic material only exists when atoms of certain elements are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero.

       At that point, clusters of atoms begin functioning as a single quantum object with both wave and particle properties.

 

When was it first created?

       BEC was created by scientists in 1995.

       Using a combination of lasers and magnets, scientists cooled a sample of rubidium to within a few degrees of absolute zero.

       At this extremely low temperature, molecular motion comes very close to stopping.

       Since there is almost no kinetic energy being transferred from one atom to another, the atoms begin to clump together. There are no longer thousands of separate atoms, just one “super atom.”

 

Significance:

       A BEC is used to study quantum mechanics on a macroscopic level. Light appears to slow down as it passes through a BEC, allowing scientists to study the particle/wave paradox.

       A BEC also has many of the properties of a superfluid, or a fluid that flows without friction.

       BECs are also used to simulate conditions that might exist in black holes.