MIT-FAPESP Research Collaboration on Superfluids
Hello reader!
It
follows one article published day (10/31) in the english website of the Agência
FAPESP highlighting the collaboration of the MIT-FAPESP research on Superfluids.
Duda Falcão
MIT-FAPESP
Research Collaboration
on Superfluids
October
31, 2012
Scientists with research
supported by the institutions
talk
during FAPESP Week about
the importance of partnerships
for the development of
Physics
and other fields (LBL)
|
"No one conducts science all alone. For cutting-edge research,
partnerships with researchers from other institutions and countries are very
important. And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has
always prided itself on attempting to solve sciences’ greatest challenges, is
one of the best partnerships we could ever dream of having,” says Vanderlei
Bagnato, Professor at the São Carlos Institute of Physics at the University of
São Paulo (USP), in the symposium at MIT held October 22, 2012.
The symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts was one of the activities
featured as part of FAPESP Week 2012,
which began in Toronto, Canada. It will be followed by events at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and the University
of West Virginia in Morgantown.
At the symposium, Bagnato spoke about the collaboration he has had with
MIT scientists since he completed his PhD. in Physics there in 1987. This
collaboration grew even more in 2012 when he began a research project to study atomic fluids with his group at
USP together with the team headed by Professor Wolfgang Ketterle, Director of
the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms and winner of the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 2001.
The research project was funded by FAPESP and MIT and selected in a call
for proposals issued within the scope of a cooperation agreement between the two
institutions.
The scientific challenges for the teams of Bagnato and Ketterle are on
the cutting-edge of physics research, in a little known area that involves
terms such as superfluidity, superconductivity and Bose-Einstein condensate
that are interrelated.
Superfluids represent a state of matter in which the matter behaves like
a fluid with zero viscosity. The phenomenon, which occurs at extremely low
temperatures - thus, the reason for referring to cold, supercold or ultracold
atoms – was discovered in 1938 in liquid helium and has applications in
astrophysics, high-energy physics and quantum theories.
An example of superfluidity is the Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a
state of matter formed by atoms at temperatures near absolute zero that allow
quantum effects to be seen on a macroscopic scale. Albert Einstein predicted
the existence of the Bose-Einstein condensate in 1925, based on the work
Satyendra Nath Bose, as a theoretical consequence of quantum mechanics.
Seventy years later, Ketterle and two scientists from the University of
Colorado, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, produced the condensate for the first
time, a feat that led to them to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.
A superfluid has properties similar to ordinary liquids and gases, like
the lack of a definite shape and the capacity to move in response to forces
applied to it. But a superfluid also has properties that are not present in
ordinary matter, such as the ability to move at very low speeds without
dissipating energy, or in other words, with zero viscosity.
At higher speeds, energy is dissipated through the formation of
vortices, a type of hole where superfluidity ends. Turbulence is a phenomenon
that occurs in fluids – liquids and gases – generally subjected to completely
disorderly movement, the vortices.
In 2009, a study conducted by Bagnato and his group, together with
researchers from the University of Florence, Italy, demonstrated that the
phenomenon of turbulence also occurs in the Bose-Einstein condensate. The
discovery shed new light on the study of the two principal challenges of
contemporary physics: the phenomena of turbulence and superfluids. The study
was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“The Bose-Einstein condensate becomes a fluid when it is subjected to a
temperature near absolute zero,” says Bagnato, who runs the Optics and Photonics
Research Center (CePOF) of São Carlos, one of the Research, Innovation and
Dissemination Centers (RIDC) funded by FAPESP.
"In order to research the phenomenon of turbulence in quantum
fluids and superfluids, collaboration with personnel from MIT will be critical,
since they have great experience in the subject. And they are researchers whose
scientific concerns are similar to those in our group in Brazil,” says Bagnato.
Ketterle was not able to take part in the FAPESP Week symposium, but MIT
was represented in a session on cold atoms by Daniel Kleppner, Professor
Emeritus of Physics at the Institute.
"Brazil is a remarkable country in many aspects, and certainly one
of them is the existence of important programs that fund basic science, such as
those offered by FAPESP. Conducting research in a cutting-edge area like
super-low temperature physics is quite difficult, and we’re very happy to be
able to collaborate with Brazilian colleagues engaged in such important work in
this field like the CePOF group in São Carlos," says Kleppner.
Source: English WebSite of the Agência FAPESP
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