Researchers with the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) have recently uncovered a new way to keep atoms in a high-energy state for longer periods.
The method utilizes dense quantum gas of atoms to create a ’Fermi sea,’ which is able to keep atoms in a high-energy state for up to 10% longer than usual, according to a release by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The process delays their return to their normal and lowest energy state. With the development, scientists hope that they will be able to improve technology such as atomic clocks and quantum communication networks.
“Pauli blocking uses well-organized quantum motional states of a Fermi sea to block the recoil of an atom that wants to decay, thus prohibiting spontaneous decay.” said NIST/JILA Fellow Jun Ye. “It is a profound quantum effect for the control of matter’s properties that was previously deemed unchangeable.”
The team of scientists from JILA executed the experiments using a low-energy Fermi gas consisting of thousands of strontium atoms. The team then used the quantum gases to make the newest and most advanced atomic clocks, the release said. In the resulting low-temperature gases, the atoms' properties and characteristics are restricted to certain values and the atoms then avoid other atoms, creating a standardized minimum resistance. In ordinary gas, atoms are more randomly spread throughout and do not have a collective influence over each other, according to NIST.
"The idea of engineering an atom’s excited-state lifetime by embedding it in a Fermi sea has been proposed before, but the JILA group is the first, along with other work published in the same issue of Science, to actually do it,” the release said. “This is the first time that atoms’ internal radiation properties have been linked to their external motion."
The findings of the experiment are expected to improve a number of technologies, as well as help researchers gain a more advanced understanding of the various energy states of atoms, according to NIST. Ye is looking forward to the continued development of the method.
“Future experiments using different energy levels in the atoms or denser and even colder gases could extend excited states for longer time periods or even block decay entirely,” Ye said.
Funding for the study was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NIST, and the National Science Foundation.
