SIGNIFICANT EVENTS - SCIENCE EVENTS
02/25/00

Ketterle Group Publishes Paper Describing Excitations of BEC

Titled "Surface Excitations of a Bose-Einstein Condensate", the paper appears in the January 31 issue of Physical Review Letters (PRL 84, 810 (2000)) with authors R. Onofrio, D. S. Durfee, C. Raman, M. Köhl, C. E. Kuklewicz, and W. Ketterle. The article states that surface modes in a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms have been studied. They observed excitations of standing and rotating quadrupolar and hexadecapolar modes. The modes were excited with high spatial and temporal resolution using the optical dipole force of a rapidly scanning laser beam. This novel technique is very flexible and should be useful for the study of rotating Bose-Einstein condensates and vortices.