Washington State Magazine

A sample of Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). Because its individual atoms act like waves rather than like particles, BEC behaves very differently than the forms of matter—gases, liquids, and solids—we are familiar with. During his postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado, Engels showed that when a drop of BEC is rotated, the drop holds still and tiny whirlpools form throughout it—unlike a drop of water, the entire mass of which spins when it’s rotated. The image reveals a crystal-like arrangement, with the whirlpools (blue spots) evenly spaced in a hexagonal pattern. Engels says working with BEC is comparable to being raised in a tropical climate, then encountering ice for the first time. Everything about it is new and wondrous, and the potential uses for it can barely be imagined. Courtesy of Eric Cornell, JILA, University of Colorado.

The shop has made dozens of vacuum systems, ranging from relatively low-power (10^-5 torr, resulting in one-one hundred thousandth as much pressure as the atmosphere at sea level) to ultrahigh vacuums of 10^-12 torr. Rough translation: by comparison, the strongest home vacuum cleaner generates about as much suction as the inhalation of a hamster.

The more powerful the suction, the more crucial it is that the pump, the chamber, all the tubes and pipes and fittings, be air tight. Henry’s staff runs everything through rigorous leakage tests.

“There are some customers that’ll come in and want a chamber, and they’ll say, we don’t care if it only goes down to five,” he says. “But that would [still have] a leak. There’s a leak in there somewhere. I never do that. It either leaks, or it don’t. If it leaks, it ain’t goin’ out of here.”

Engels’s vacuum apparatus, as high-powered as it is, was not the toughest assignment the Instrument Shop has had. That distinction belongs to large vacuum chambers in the lab of Lai-Sheng Wang at WSU Tri-Cities.

“The first one, when he came up to ask if we could make it, I really, really wanted to make it,” says Henry. “But couldn’t. It made me uncomfortable to say, ‘No, we can’t make it,’ because I knew that the guys out here could do it, we just didn’t have the machinery.” He says Wang ended up buying a system from an outside firm for more than $100,000.

When the shop obtained the CNCs a few years later, Henry was able to say yes to a new request from Tri-Cities. Xue-Bin Wang, a research associate professor working with Lai-Sheng Wang, says, “We persisted, and George took the challenge.”

So far, the two instruments the shop has made for the Wang lab have provided data for nearly 100 published papers, including reports in the renowned journals Nature and Science. Each instrument cost Wang just a few thousand dollars.

It seems the more complex a project, the bigger the savings by using tech services rather than an outside source. Since they are subsidized by the College of Sciences, the WSU shops are blisteringly competitive. The instrument and electronics shops charge researchers within the College $16.75 an hour and those in other colleges at WSU $39 an hour. By contrast, hourly rates run $75 to $115 at the University of Washington and $200 at commercial shops. The fees help pay staff salaries and operating expenses, and are the sole source of funds to purchase major equipment such as the CNCs.

For Engels, paying the bill was relatively easy. Assembly of the machine, on the other hand, was “chaotic.” He and physics major Collin Atherton added pieces as they became available. For parts that came from outside sources, that meant seemingly endless delays. They waited six months for the power supply to arrive.

Finally, on May 4, 2006, Engels and Atherton flipped a switch, adjusted the laser beams, and waited. The machine hummed. Temperature in the MOT dropped. The magnet slid on its rail—and on a computer screen, a bright, pencil-shaped image flared into existence. They had made BEC.

“The coldest stuff in the universe,” as Engels describes it, survives just over a minute. That’s plenty of time to experiment with it and photograph the results. Then Engels fires up the machine and makes another batch. He is embarking on experiments on how the rare superfluid reacts to impacts, and what happens when two elements are mixed and then condensed.

“He’ll kind of explore,” says Tomsovic. “It’s a new state of matter. So you start playing with it and doing different kinds of experiments, and learning how the physics of that stuff works.”

He can also start pursuing external grant support, which should be much easier now that he is the only physicist in the region who can produce BEC. Tomsovic shakes his head over the trend at universities nationwide to do away with their internal shops; he says the facilities here give his department a fighting chance to land researchers like Engels.

“We’re really tiny compared to the average physics department and the size of our peers,” he says. “If you’re a physicist and you come in here [as a job candidate] and you’re a little nervous about what we have, then you go down there and say, well that’s a lot better than what this other, ‘better’ place has.

“Peter’s a smart guy. He knew what he needed, and he knew this was as good as or better than what he would need [in order] to do what he wanted to do.”

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Making equipment for ground-breaking research is dandy, but to get a true measure of how important the Instrument Shop is to the Pullman campus, visit the WSU Creamery.

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