Top French laboratory confirms SUT prediction
March 2010
France's top physics lab, Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, has published a new experimental study of ultra-cold atoms, one
of the `hottest' fields of modern physics. Their paper published in Nature this month confirms a theoretical prediction
made by Swinburne physicists. The SUT calculation, by Liu, Hu, and Drummond, worked out the equations describing a new
form of matter. Outside of the laboratory, this new form of matter, a universal Fermi gas, is only found inside
neutron stars.
Swinburne physicists, using a novel theoretical approach, predicted a new value for the virial
coefficient used to descibe the universal gas. The predicted value was completely different from previous theories, even
having the opposite sign. The first experiment in the world was carried out by Christoph Salomon last year, in Paris.
The requirements for the experiment were to cool millions of atoms of lithium metal to a billionth of the temperature
of outer space.
The novel SUT theory was developed last year with funding from the Australian Research
Council. It used exact mathemetical solutions for one of the hardest problems in physics: the three-body quantum
bound state. The results of the experiment matched theoretical predictions to the last measured decimal. The
French laboaratory's independent and careful experimental work at the frontiers of physics completely justifies
the new theoretical approach developed in Australia.
Understanding such cold temperatures is an advance in pure science today. Tomorrow's technology
will be built on these types of development, as the physics of ultra-cold atoms is applied to new generations of quantum
sensors and simulators.
SEE
Virial expansion for a strongly correlated Fermi gas, by X. Liu, H. Hu, & P. D. Drummond,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 160401 (2009)
Exploring the thermodynamics of a universal Fermi gas, by S. Nascimbčne, N. Navon, K. J. Jiang, F. Chevy & C. Salomon, Nature 463(7284):1057 (2010).
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