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.
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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.