Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology are part of a new study
that could help unlock the potential of superfluids—essentially frictionless
special substances capable of unstopped motion once initiated. A team of
scientists led by Mishkat Bhattacharya, an associate professor at RIT's
School of Physics and Astronomy and Future Photon Initiative, proposed a new
method for detecting superfluid motion in an article published in Physical
Review Letters.
Scientists have previously created superfluids in liquids, solids, and
gases, and hope harnessing superfluids' properties could help lead to
discoveries such as a superconductor that works at room temperature.
Bhattacharya said such a discovery could revolutionize the electronics
industry, where loss of energy due to resistive heating of wires incurs
major costs.
However, one of the main problems with studying superfluids is that all
available methods of measuring the delicate superfluid rotation bring the
motion to a halt. Bhattacharya and his team of RIT postdoctoral researchers
teamed up with scientists in Japan, Taiwan, and India to propose a new
detection method that is minimally destructive, in situ, and in real-time.
Bhattacharya said the techniques used to detect gravitational waves
predicted by Einstein inspired the new method. The basic idea is to pass
laser light through the rotating superfluid. The light that emerged would
then pick up a modulation at the frequency of superfluid rotation. Detecting
this frequency in the light beam using existing technology yielded knowledge
of the superfluid motion. The challenge was to ensure the laser beam did not
disturb the superflow, which the team accomplished by choosing a light
wavelength different from any that would be absorbed by the atoms.
"Our proposed method is the first to ensure minimally destructive
measurement and is a thousand times more sensitive than any available
technique," said Bhattacharya. "This is a very exciting development, as the
combination of optics with atomic superflow promises entirely new
possibilities for sensing and information processing."
Bhattacharya and his colleagues also showed that the light beam could
actively manipulate supercurrents. In particular, they showed that the light
could create quantum entanglement between two currents flowing in the same
gas. Such entanglement could be useful for storing and processing quantum
information.
Reference:
Pardeep Kumar et al, Cavity Optomechanical Sensing and Manipulation of an
Atomic Persistent Current, Physical Review Letters (2021).
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.113601
Tags:
Physics