Unified theorem explains wide range of condensed phenomena

Superconduction and Bose-Einstein condensation are two of the most common and well-known "strange" phenomena in cold physics. On June 8th, two UC Berkeley physicist published a paper detailing their long-sought solution to a difficult problem: obtaining a simple theoretical description for a wide variety of weird things that happen when you cool atoms to near-absolute-zero temperatures. "This is a particularly exciting result because it concerns pretty much all areas of physics; not only condensed matter physics, but also astrophysics, atomic, particle and nuclear physics and cosmology," said Murayama, the MacAdams Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. "We are putting together all of them into a single theoretical framework." Their research could have important implications for the use of these materials.