Photo finish in race for strontium condensate

Published in Physics World, 18 Nov 2009

An Austrian group has beaten its US counterpart by a matter of days in a race to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of strontium atoms.

Researchers at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Information (IQOQI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences submitted their paper on a strontium BEC – a mass of ultracold atoms all in the same quantum state – just 10 days before those at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The breakthrough makes way for more precise quantum timekeeping and new studies of the quantum nature of matter. […]

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