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diagram showing how gas was trapped in laser beam

In the top portion of this illustration, the gas of fermions (red) is trapped in an infrared laser beam (pink) and held in place by a magnetic field generated by current-carrying coils (blue). Two additional laser beams, shown in green, were used like coffee stirrers to set the gas into rotation. The result, as illustrated below, could be seen in a shadow picture of the expanded cloud that showed its superfluid behavior: The gas was pierced by a regular array of vortices. Image / Andre Schirotzek, MIT

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