Current theories can't explain observed spin segregation
Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 11:14
in Physics & Chemistry
Experiments with quantum systems sometimes yield surprising results. This is exactly what happened when John Thomas, a researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina found out when he and his post doc, Du, and his students Luo and Clancy, attempted to study a trapped cloud of Fermi atoms all initially in the same quantum superposition of spin-up and spin-down states. They expected all of the atoms to move uniformly back and forth in the trap. Instead, the atoms moved in a way that not predicted using existing theory.