From neutron stars to high-temperature superconductors, strongly interacting many-body systems at or near quantum degeneracy are a rich source of intriguing phenomena. The microscopic structure of the first-discovered quantum fluid, superfluid liquid helium, is difficult to access due to limited experimental probes. While an ultracold atomic Bose gas with tunable interactions (characterized by its scattering length, a) had been proposed as an alternative strongly interacting Bose system [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] , experimental progress [9][10][11][12] has been limited by its short lifetime. Here we present time-resolved measurements of the momentum distribution of a Bose-condensed gas that is suddenly jumped to unitarity, i.e. to a = ∞. Contrary to expectation, we observe that the gas lives long enough to permit the momentum to evolve to a quasi-steady-state distribution, consistent with universality, while remaining degenerate. Investigations of the time evolution of this unitary Bose gas may lead to a deeper understanding of quantum many-body physics.A powerful feature of atom gas experiments that provides access to these new regimes is the ability to change the interaction strength using a magnetic-field Feshbach resonance [13]. In particular, at the resonance location, a is infinite. For atomic Fermi gases [14][15][16][17][18][19][20], accessing this regime by adiabatically changing a led to the achievement of superfluids of paired fermions and enabled investigation of the crossover from superfluidity of weakly bound pairs, analogous to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductors, to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of tightly bound molecules [16,17]. For bosonic atoms, however, this route to strong interactions is stymied by the fact that three-body inelastic collisions increase as a to the fourth power [21][22][23]. This circumstance has limited experimental investigation of Bose gases with increasing interaction strength to studying either non-quantum-degenerate gases [24,25] or BECs with modest interaction strengths (na 3 < 0.008, where n is the atom number density) [9][10][11][12].The problem is that the loss rate scales as n 2 a 4 while the equilibration rate scales as na 2 v, where v is the average velocity. Thus, it would seem that the losses will always dominate as a is increased to ∞. Even if we were to forsake thermal equilibrium and suddenly change a in order to project a weakly interacting BEC onto strong interactions [12,[26][27][28], one might expect that three-body losses would still dominate the ensuing dynamics for large a. In this work, however, we use this approach to take a BEC to the unitary gas regime, and we observe dynamics that in fact saturate on a timescale shorter than that set by three-body losses and that exhibit universal scaling with density.

X-ray induced damage has been known for decades and has largely been viewed as a tremendous nuisance. We, on the other hand, harness the highly ionizing and penetrating properties of hard X-rays to initiate novel decomposition and synthetic chemistry. Here, we show that powdered cesium oxalate monohydrate pressurized to ≤0.5 GPa and irradiated with X-rays of energies near the cesium K-edge undergoes molecular and structural transformations with one of the final products exhibiting a new type of bcc crystal structure that has previously not been observed. Additionally, based on cascades of ultrafast electronic relaxation steps triggered by the absorption of one X-ray photon, we propose a model explaining the X-ray induced damage of multitype bounded matter. As X-rays are ubiquitous, these results show promise in the preparation of novel compounds and novel structures that are inaccessible via conventional methods. They may offer insight into the formation of complex organic compounds in outer space.

We report measurements of the X-ray-induced decomposition of crystalline strontium oxalate (SrCO) as a function of energy and high pressure in two separate experiments. SrCO at ambient conditions was irradiated with monochromatic synchrotron X-rays ranging in energy from 15 to 28 keV. A broad resonance of the decomposition yield was observed with a clear maximum when irradiating with ∼20 keV X-rays and ambient pressure. Little or no decomposition was observed at 15 keV, which is below the Sr K-shell energy of 16.12 keV, suggesting that excitation of core electrons may play an important role in the destabilization of the CO anion. A second experiment was performed to investigate the high-pressure dependence of the X-ray-induced decomposition of strontium oxalate at fixed energy. SrCO was compressed in a diamond anvil cell (DAC) in the pressure range from 0 to 7.6 GPa with 1 GPa increments and irradiated in situ with 20 keV X-rays. A marked pressure dependence of the decomposition yield of SrCO was observed with a decomposition yield maximum at around 1 GPa, suggesting that different crystal structures of the material play an important role in the decomposition process. This may be due in part to a phase transition observed near this pressure.