phase transition

The Joerg Heber post that provided one of the two papers for yesterday's Hanbury Brown Twiss-travaganza also included a write-up of a new paper in Nature on Mott insulators, which was also written up in Physics World. Most of the experimental details are quite similar to a paper by Markus Greiner's group I wrote up in June: They make a Bose-Einstein Condensate, load it into an optical lattice, and use a fancy lens system to detect individual atoms at sites of the lattice. This lattice can be prepared in a "Mott insulator" state, where each site is occupied by a definite number of atoms. As…

A press release from Harvard caught my eye last week, announcing results from Markus Greiner's group that were, according to the release, published in Science. The press release seems to have gotten the date wrong, though-- the article didn't appear in Science last week. It is, however, available on the arxiv, so you get the ResearchBlogging for the free version a few days before you can pay an exorbitant amount to read it in the journal. The title of the paper is "Probing the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition at the Single Atom Level," which is kind of a lot of jargon. The key image is…