Quantum Matchmaker

Late last year, Deborah Jin coaxed several hundred thousand fiercely antisocial atomic particles to dance as partners in a very, very cold gas. What resulted was one of the most sought-after, bizarre and basic forms of matter, giving scientists a potential key to unlock the secrets of superconductivity.

Jin, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., led a team in creating the first Fermi condensate on Dec. 16, 2003. Their work has been described as a crucial first step in developing superconductors that work at room temperature. Superconductors, which transmit electricity without any energy loss, aren't widely used because it costs too much to keep them sufficiently chilled. At room temperature, however, they could lead to faster computers, smaller cell phones, lower electric bills and heretofore unimagined technologies. Jin has developed a tool to help scientists understand the basic physics behind them.

"We've opened a door. We don't know where it will lead," says Jin, who also teaches at the University of Colorado. One thing is certain: The 35-year-old daughter of physicists and mother of a toddler, Jin has become a role model for young women in a discipline dominated by men.

Her creation builds on an earlier achievement that earned two NIST colleagues a share in the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics. In 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman created a similar form of matter by trapping and cooling bosons, one of two essential kinds of atoms, until the particles huddled together and behaved identically, like a single super atom. Their creation kicked off an intense race to condense the other essential kind of atoms, fermions. Jin won the race, enticing normally repellent atoms to pair up like electrons in a superconductor.

Unlike bosons, fermions avoid each other when refrigerated to the extremes necessary for superconductivity. Jin-who won a $500,000 "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation last year-got around that by using a magnetic field as a fine-tunable Cupid, forcing loner atoms to pair up, and controlling the strength of the pairing by adjusting the magnetic field. As pairs of fermions began behaving like bosons, they coalesced into a novel form of matter. "The strength of pairing in our fermionic condensate," Jin says, "would correspond to a room-temperature superconductor."

Not everyone agrees with her, but Cornell hails the feat as a "major breakthrough." He notes that it was much more difficult than the one that inspired it. "I was interested," he says, "but I thought it would be too hard."