Building research excellence at NUS Centre for Quantum Technologies

22 May 2009

Speaking at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) during a visit on 22 May 2009, Chairman of the National Research Foundation Dr Tony Tan, said: “I commend the CQT for achieving such a difficult undertaking in a relatively short time. The remarkable achievement of Dr Murray Barrett and Kyle Arnold makes Singapore one of a small number of countries in the world to achieve this complex atomic physics experiment.”

Dr Tan was referring to the work of the two researchers who have successfully accomplished the Bose-Einstein condensation whereby a collection of atoms reach a state of matter that is as cold as the fundamental laws of Physics allow.

The Bose-Einstein condensate is named after Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein who predicted the state in 1924. However, it was not until 1995 that a group of researchers managed to produce the Bose-Einstein condensate in the laboratory. In recognition of their work, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2001. To-date, only a select number of countries in the region including Japan and Australia are known to have been able to produce the condensate.

"Singapore is able to attract the brightest and most committed research talent to carry out breakthrough science," said Dr Tan. He highlighted that despite the current economic downturn, Singapore will still continue to invest in research and development. It is only in doing so that the country will not stagnate and be overtaken by other developed nations.

The CQT is the first Research Centre of Excellence (RCE) established in Singapore to help local universities become research-intensive through world-class, investigator-led research that has a global impact. Besides helping first-rate academic investigators perform high quality, high-impact research, RCEs aim to enhance graduate education and train quality research manpower. It also aims to create new knowledge in areas of strategic relevance to Singapore.