Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich have demonstrated for the first time a continuous atom laser beam, according to the Physical Review Letters, 12 April 1999. What they're calling an atom laser I would be more likely to refer to as a particle beam, or at most as laser-like matter waves. It seems the atoms referred to are being excited by radio waves (Maser) then propelled by the energy from a laser. The first atom laser produced pulses of atoms, rather than a continuous beam. Researcher Theodor Haensch described a design that produces a continuous stream of atoms lasting as long as 100 milliseconds. The beam can potentially have the radius of 1 nm., which is thousands of times smaller than the beam of a standard optical laser. These German researchers created a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium within a carefully defined magnetic field. A radio wave is used to address a certain magnetic field region of the condensate which converts atoms from a trapped to an untrapped state, then a pair of optical lasers are applied, which impart energy and thus momentum to the untrapped atoms. The design generates a "quasi-continuous beam," atoms packed so close together that they actually overlap. The beam spreads out only one-tenth of a degree which is comparable to laser pointer. Whether I disagree as to what to call it, this device or process, once they work out the bugs, will indeed be usefull in certain areas.
commentary provided by D. Mickle, PhD.
Revised: July 02, 1999.