A team of physicists have created a quantum system with unusual stability - Image: Christoph Hohmann / NIM
Research news - When James Bond asks the barkeeper for a Martini, 'shaken, not stirred', he takes it for granted that the ingredients of the drink are miscible. In the quantum world, however, he might be in for a surprise! A team of physicists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) has now prepared a form of quantum matter that is robust to shaking - a property that would make life difficult for cocktail lovers. In fact, the problem with quantum matter normally lies in its extreme sensitivity to perturbation: The action of even weak oscillatory forces typically has drastic consequences in the long term and is expected to dramatically alter its initial state. Therefore - up until now - it had been widely assumed that quantum systems should normally be susceptible to mixing, since shaking injects energy into the system, and should cause it to heat up indefinitely. Now the research groups from Munich have experimentally characterized an exotic quantum state that does not behave this way: When subjected to a periodic force, its constituents do not mix. They first cooled a cloud of potassium atoms to an extremely low temperature in a vacuum chamber. They then loaded the ultracold atoms into an optical lattice formed by counter-propagating laser beams that generate standing waves.
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