Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 16 March 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5818, pp. 1556 - 1558
DOI: 10.1126/science.1138807
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Reports

Critical Behavior of a Trapped Interacting Bose Gas

T. Donner,1 S. Ritter,1 T. Bourdel,1 A. Öttl,1 M. Köhl,1,2* T. Esslinger1

The phase transition of Bose-Einstein condensation was studied in the critical regime, where fluctuations extend far beyond the length scale of thermal de Broglie waves. We used matter-wave interference to measure the correlation length of these critical fluctuations as a function of temperature. Observations of the diverging behavior of the correlation length above the critical temperature enabled us to determine the critical exponent of the correlation length for a trapped, weakly interacting Bose gas to be {nu} = 0.67 ± 0.13. This measurement has direct implications for the understanding of second-order phase transitions.

1 Institute of Quantum Electronics, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland.
2 Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: koehl{at}phys.ethz.ch

Read the Full Text

To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)