AUSTRIAN physicists have pipped their rivals to the post by making the world’s first quantum super-molecule. They coaxed 100,000 lithium molecules into a collective called a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this elusive state individual molecules become indistinguishable, behaving effectively as one. Physicists hope that molecular BECs like this will help solve the mystery of how high-temperature electrical superconductors work.
BECs have already been created out of atoms. But there is no direct way to cool molecules to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, the kind of temperature required for the condensates to form. So Selim Jochim…
