indigofuzzy - 11-7-2007 at 21:58
A friend and I were discussing Bose-Einstein condensates the other night. Remembering the article I had seen briefly (back in 1998) in the washington
post, which said that a BEC behaves like a "superatom", my friend posed the question: what if a BEC was to be bade from a radioisotope?
We wondered if:
1) would a BEC even form?
2) how would radioactive decay affect the BEC?
3) would the whole thing decay all at once?
I don't know how much knowledge about BEC is floating around, so I figured I'd ask if anyone here has any theories about what would happen...
Sauron - 12-7-2007 at 00:10
I wouldn't get too worked up about hyperbole about chemistry you read in the Washington POST.
B-E condensate can't be made of all elements. Only some.
And thus far the quantities made are miniscule (a few million atoms only)
The effect is that of all the electron shells being at the lowest quantum level.
So why would you expect a radioisotope to behave any differently, assuming that it was an isotope of an element that can undergo Bose-Eistein
condensation in the first place?
It's apples and oranges, an electron-shell status versus a variation in the nucleus.
The interesting question would be to consider the density of B-E condensate and apply the consequences to fissionable material, but I strongly suspect
that decay heat would defeat laser cooling and evaporative cooling and thus the material would never get anywhere near enough to 0 K to B-E condense.
Was this the sort of thing you were musing about with your first post? Think again. Lasers can and do trigger supercriticality but by heating not
cooling.
I think you need more physica and less Washington POST.
[Edited on 12-7-2007 by Sauron]
12AX7 - 12-7-2007 at 13:35
BEC is a very cold and thus low energy, low speed and large dimension (i.e. large De Broglie wavelength) phenomenon. The nuclei are still there, but
as far as anyone is concerned they don't exist, shielded by layers of electrons. As with chemistry (itself a much higher energy phenomenon, in the
100s-of-K range / fractional-to-several-eV range), only the outside dimensions, charge and such matter. And for that matter, the atoms probably
behave as solid ensembles, without much consideration even for their electrons.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about the physics of a BEC.
Tim