Talk:Magnetic evaporative cooling

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For a January 2004 deletion debate over this page see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Magnetic evaporative cooling

What is Ice 9? Did you mean ICE-9 (flexible curriculum of nine essential questions for understanding and evaluating technology)?

[edit] Analogy

The article contains the analogy:

A way to visualize this is to take a bowl and fill it almost all the way up with popcorn. Then shake the bowl enough so that the bouncing isn't enough to spill over the side. Every so often one of the popped corns will jump out, "evaporating" from the bowl.

This seems misleading to me, since in the popcorn case the energy that ejects the popcorn from the bowl comes from an external source (the shaking) whereas in evaporative cooling it comes from the heat energy of the particles. Maybe ordinary evaporative cooling would be a better analogy? Gdr 01:30, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)

[edit] Temperature change

The article claims that temperatures around 50 picoKelvin are needed to make a BEC from Rubidium atoms. According to Weiman, Cornel et al. however, temperatures only need to be in the tens of microKelvins. Since they won the nobel prize for making the first gaseous BEC out of Rubidium, I say we go with their numbers.

See "Observations of Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic vapor," M.H. Anderson, J.R. Ensher, M.R. Matthews, C.E. Wieman, and E.A. Cornell, Sci. 269, 198-201 (1995)

A copy of the article is available off the NIST website at http://www.bec.nist.gov

Hermes917 00:37, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

I think the ICE-9 reference was to the kurt vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle, Ice-nine.