The Story of a literally Super-cool journey!
The Story of a literally Super-cool journey!
4th June 1924 can be surely marked as a historical day in the field of quantum physics. Renowned theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, a then young Reader in Dhaka University was trying to teach Planck’s radiation law to his students but found the existing derivations unsatisfactory to explain it fully. With his immense enthusiasm, he started to work out on better explanations and found a new approach of deriving the equation that didn’t entail assumptions from classical physics that were used in the previous derivations by Planck and Einstein. Bose made a short manuscript over it and communicated to a journal in London. Alas, they promptly rejected his idea! But Bose was someone of strong determination who didn’t give up easily so he wrote another manuscript defining his new concept and sent it off to Albert Einstein. The date was none other than 4th June 1924.
Rest was history! Einstein not only carefully read the manuscript but realized its novelty and translated it into German himself. The paper was communicated to Zeitschrift für Physik along with his short follow-up letter and got published soon enough. This Bose-Einstein concept became one of the crucial break-through in quantum physics.
From Bose’s point of view, the undistinguished nature of particle was the prime point to reach the radiation law and he first took the proposition that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution would not be true for the “microscopic particles” where their fluctuations (Due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) is significant. After a while, Einstein generalized Bose’s method for ideal gases and he presented the mathematical derivations showing that the quantum gas would undergo a phase conversion at a sufficiently low temperature or “super cool temperature” when a big fraction of the atoms would condense into their lowest energy state. This condensation state is known as “Bose-Einstein Condensation” or BEC. Can you imagine that the temperature is near absolute zero (0 K, − 273.15 °C, or − 459.67 °F) where sub-atomic particle (named “Boson”) coalesce into a single quantum mechanical entity!