by Cherie Winner
photography by Robert Hubner and Duke Beattie
 Photoillustration by Robert Hubner and John Paxson  Instrument Shop supervisor George Henry.
Shortly after Peter Engels arrived at Washington State
University in the fall of 2004, he took a sketch of a lens bracket
to a machine shop in the basement of Webster Hall.
"Can you make this?" the young physicist asked.
"Yeah," said Instrument Shop supervisor George Henry.
"Can you make it for less than 72 cents?"
Two years later, Henry laughs as he recalls the exchange. "I
said, 'Yeah. . .' And we did. And from that point on it just
went-whoosh!"
That was the beginning of Engels's quest to build a machine that
would produce Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a rare form of matter
that is leading to advances in computing that could someday make
today's computers seem as inefficient as cutting notches on a
stick.
BEC had been made before. The first time was in 1995, by groups
working independently at the University of Colorado and MIT. But
even now, five years after those scientists won the Nobel Prize in
Physics for their accomplishment, BEC remains devilishly hard to
produce. Only a few dozen labs worldwide have ever done it, none of
them in the Pacific Northwest.
So what made Peter Engels-a brand new faculty member who started
with nothing more than an empty room-think he could make BEC?
First, he had experience: he got his doctorate in one of the
three German labs that had done it, and then worked with one of the
Colorado Nobel Prize winners.
Second, he'd met George Henry and seen the Instrument Shop.
"When we interview people, we take them through tech services,"
says physics and astronomy department chairman Steven Tomsovic.
"They always come away impressed."
A support department in the College of Sciences, Technical
Services is not a supply house or a maintenance operation. With
five shops-instrument, electronics, software, media, and
graphics-it's a creative unit in its own right; and it's at the
heart of much of the best research being done at WSU.
"In physics, it's almost impossible to imagine someone doing
cutting-edge experiments not having to design a whole bunch of
stuff," says Tomsovic. "If you want to do something different, then
almost by definition of it being different, the machines can't be
there already."
That's not new; the questions scientists can ask have always
depended on the tools that are available to them. Anton von
Leeuwenhoek's simple microscope revealed the microbes teeming in a
drop of water; the electron microscope made it possible to explore
the insides of cells; and the Hubble telescope opened the vast
deeps of space to our gaze.
Engels likewise is on a scientific threshold. Bose-Einstein
condensates were named for physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and
Albert Einstein, who in the 1920s theorized that at temperatures
very close to absolute zero (about -459°F), gaseous atoms would
condense into a new form of matter-a "superfluid"-in which they
would behave like waves instead of like particles. It was a
speculation both fascinating and frustrating, because it couldn't
be tested. There was no way to generate temperatures that low.
"People first thought it was something that just exists in
theory, it doesn't exist in reality," says Engels. "So then the
race was on: how do we get these ultracold temperatures?"
It took about 70 years and the development of laser cooling
techniques to move BEC from the realm of theory to the realm of
experiment; and achieving ultracold temperatures remains the main
obstacle to making BEC.
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