In article <5dosrt$mb6@foglet.rutgers.edu>, mreinbol@falcon.lhup.edu (Morgan D. Reinbold) wrote:
> Just a few bits and pieces I overheard on CNN... Evidently, scientists
> at MIT have developed a huge mass of machinery which is able to move
> atoms in a controlled, predictable, wave-like pattern, as opposed to
> chaotically bouncing through space.
Not quite - it's a magnetic trap containing super-cold Sodium atoms. Get them cold enough and you obtain a Bose-Einstein condensate (remember your old statistical thermodynamics courses?)
This B-E condensate trap acts somewhat like the resonant cavity of a laser: all the atoms are in the same state (that's the B-E condensate bit) and apparently their wavefunctions are also coherent - although I don't recall enough quantum thermo to be able to say if that is necessarily the case for a bose einstein condensate.
The funky bit comes when they let a burst of atoms out of the trap with a radio frequency pulse disruping the magnetic trap. This produces a clump of atoms buzzing along like any other- BUT if you cut this clump in half with a laser (actually I think it was the trap itself that was divided in two, producing two clump at the start) then when these clumps overlap as they diffuse, instead of getting a superposition of intensities you get interference fringes, just like in Young's slit experiment with light.
Anyway, go see the pictures (and even movies) on
http://bink.mit.edu/dallin/news.html
or http://www.aip.org/physnews/special.htm
and you'll understand more than my poor explanation can make clear. On the
first site there are a few links to discussions of nanotech applications,
but I seem to recall that they mostly apply to micromachining rather than
MNT.
-- Gavin Wheeler wheeler@lpbc.jussieu.fr