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Old 12-October-2005, 01:21 PM
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Well, at first glance, it appears that Mr. Kornowski is convolving two recent experiemtns by Dr. Ketterle. First a bit of background, Ketterle shared the 2001 Nobel in physics for being one of the first to create a Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC). Bosons, (particles with integer spin) are not restricted by the Pauli exclusion principle (which applies to half-spin fermions such as electrons) and a large number of them, when sufficiently cooled, can all share the same quantum state.

Ketterle has continued to probe the properties of BEC's. One question is if they are superfluids like Helium-4. One piece of evidence for this would be if they could sustain quantized vortices as He-4 does. Ketterle did some work on this in 2000, as reported in this Physics Today article from August 2000. Using what they termed "optical spoons" they were able to "stir" a BEC in a magnetic trap and confirm the quantized vortex behavior.

What seems to have gotten Mr. Kornowski excited is an article from the 13 May 2005 issue of Physical Review Letters titled Formation Dynamics of a Fermion Pair Condensate. (Link is to abstract you need a subscription or pay to read the article). Pairs of fermions can link up to form a boson-like conglomerate. One example of this are electrons forming Cooper pairs in a superconductor.

I've printed out the paper and will report back on it shortly. However, on first glance I doubt the connection between it and Mr. Kornowski's idea. I'll do a more detailed critique later (the day job calls) but one question I would like him to answer is what mechanism or force binds two neutrinos (which are fermions) into a pair such as the one discussed in the paper. Also, Mr. Kornowski, it would be useful if you provided the references to the source documents as well as your own publications.
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