Foundational Work in Fermionic Condensates

August 2004, page 23

The March 2004 issue of Physics Today (page 21) gave a nice description of the recent results by Cindy Regal, Markus Greiner, and Deborah Jin on the observation of Bose−Einstein condensation of paired fermionic atoms in the interesting strongly interacting regime. Unfortunately, the article failed to mention the seminal theoretical work of Murray Holland and coworkers¹ that inspired the experiment discussed. Holland's work demonstrated that one could get strong coupling in a cold fermionic gas near a Feshbach resonance, and hence BEC at very high temperatures, just as was observed. Eddy Timmermans and coworkers published similar ideas at about the same time.²

Incidentally, Tin-Lun Ho's comment to Physical Review Letters, in which he disputed the reported interpretation, was withdrawn.