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Published on: November 11, 2013
Can Bose-Einstein Condensates Enhance Radioactive Decay?
Hanzhen Lin1, Yu-Kun Lu1, Wolfgang Ketterle1
1MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA, and , Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Abstract:
This Letter lays out the principles of how Bose-Einstein condensates can modify radioactive decay. We highlight the challenges of many modes and short coherence times due to the ≈MeV energies of the emitted radiation. Recent proposals for gamma-ray and neutrino lasers claim that using a Bose-Einstein condensate as a source would solve these issues. We show that this is not the case, and the proposed experiments would have a gain of only 10^{-16} or smaller. We also analyze proposals for gamma-ray lasers based on stimulated annihilation of positronium Bose-Einstein condensates.
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