text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

In the last few years theories in which the Standard Model gauge fields propagate in flat extra dimensions at or around the weak scale have attracted considerable interest. For early work on such models see, for example . In some of these theories the Standard Model quarks and leptons are localized to a brane but in others they too propagate in the bulk. Theories of this type have been used to explain, among other things, the fermion mass hierarchy , the number of fermion generations , the non-observation of proton decay , the observed abundance of dark matter , the small neutrino mass , the weak mixing angle   and the origin of supersymmetry breaking (see e.g. ). The implications of some of these models for current and future collider experiments have been investigated  and used to put bounds on the size of the extra dimensions. The current bound is about 300 GeV-1.

In this paper we consider the problem of stabilizing the volume of the extra dimensions. We find that in a large class of stabilization mechanisms the field which corresponds to fluctuations in the volume of the extra dimensions remains light even after stabilization, and can give sizable corrections to Newtonian gravity. This field is a scalar in the four dimensional effective theory, which we will call the radion. The inverse mass of the radion is typically in the sub-millimeter range. Its couplings violate the equivalence principle, albeit weakly, and mediate a force between matter that is comparable to that of gravity.

The existence of this light field is generic if volume stabilization does not involve dynamics at scales higher than the cutoff of the higher dimensional Standard Model, which we denote by $`M_{}`$, and if the effective theory below the compactification scale is four dimensional. The reason is not difficult to understand. Consider a theory where the gauge fields propagate in $`D>4`$ dimensions. Since the radion, which we denote by $`V`$, emerges from the higher dimensional gravity sector its action in the four dimensional effective theory has the form below.

$$d^4x\sqrt{g}\left(2M_4^2R^{\left(4\right)}+\mathrm{c}\frac{2M_4^2}{V^2}_\mu V^\mu V\mathrm{\Omega }(V)\right)$$
(1)
Here c is a dimensionless number of order one that depends on the number of dimensions, $`M_4`$ is the four dimensional Planck scale and $`\mathrm{\Omega }(V)`$ is the potential for the radion. If the dynamics which stabilizes the radion emerges from scales lower than or of order the cutoff of the higher dimensional Standard Model then $`<\mathrm{\Omega }>`$ is less than or of order $`M_{}^D<V>`$. We then expect the mass2 of the radion to be less than or of order $`\frac{M_{}^D<V>}{M_4^2}`$. The requirement that the Standard Model gauge coupling be perturbative up to the scale $`M_{}`$ implies that $`M_{}^{D4}<V>`$ is bounded from above. We will denote the upper bound on this quantity by $`n_D`$. For five dimensions $`n_5740`$, while for 6 dimensions $`n_64000`$ . For all $`D>6`$ $`n_D<30^{D4}`$. The bound on $`n_D`$ implies that $`M_{}`$ is not more than two decades larger than the inverse radius of the extra dimensions if they are toroidal. Since we are assuming that the extra dimensions are at or about the weak scale this then implies a radion mass which is far below the electroweak scale. For example for one extra dimension of inverse radius 500 GeV and the cutoff $`M_{}`$ of order 1.5 TeV we find a radion mass of about .005 eV. A particle of this mass can mediate forces between particles up to a distance of about 40 microns, which is within the range of experiments searching for deviations from Newtonian gravity at short distances. Note that such a small compactification radius is well beyond the range of current collider experiments searching for universal extra dimensions.

In this analysis above we have implicitly assumed that the effective theory below the scale $`R^1`$ is four dimensional and that the Standard Model along with the radion is a complete description of physics below this scale. If the hierarchy problem is solved at low scales as in the case of large extra dimensions  this analysis does not necessarily apply. We will consider this possibility in more detail in a subsequent section.

One may also worry that such a light radion mass would not be stable under radiative corrections, which would raise its mass to the electroweak scale. However this is not the case. The reason is that the radion mass is protected by higher dimensional general covariance, because the radion is part of the higher dimensional gravity multiplet. Hence it is not possible to write a radion mass term in the higher dimensional theory. Therefore the radion mass in the four dimensional effective theory must emerge as a finite effect, and loops which contribute to the radion mass will be cutoff at the compactification scale $`R^1`$, where $`R`$ is the radius of the extra dimensions. However since the couplings of the radion in the effective theory are all Planck suppressed the corrections to the radion mass2 from quantum effects will also be suppressed by at least two powers of $`M_4`$. Since the only other scale besides $`R^1`$ available to make up the dimensions of mass2 is the cutoff $`M_{}`$, and because radiative effects are loop suppressed, we do not expect radiative corrections to overwhelm our classical result. For example the correction to the radion mass from the Casimir energy of bulk fields is of order $`\frac{1}{16\pi ^2}\frac{R^4}{M_4^2}`$ which is much smaller than the typical classical contribution $`\frac{M_{}^D<V>}{M_4^2}`$.

From where does the leading correction to Newtonian gravity arise? Consider the coupling of the radion to the SU(3) gauge fields in the four dimensional effective theory which takes the form

$$d^4x\sqrt{g}\frac{V}{g_D^2}\mathrm{Tr}F_{\mu \nu }F^{\mu \nu }$$
(2)
Clearly $`\sqrt{\frac{g_D^2}{<V>}}`$ is the effective four dimensional SU(3) gauge coupling $`g`$ at the matching scale, which is approximately the radius of the extra dimensions, $`R=\frac{<V>^{\frac{1}{D4}}}{2\pi }`$. Now the mass of a nucleon is (up to corrections which depend on the light quark massses) proportional to $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{QCD}`$, the scale where the SU(3) gauge coupling becomes strong. Since $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{QCD}`$ depends on the radion VEV, the nucleon mass depends on the radion VEV and therefore there is a coupling of the radion to nucleons. The coupling of the radion to the nucleon in linear order

$$\frac{m_N}{<V>}\left(V<V>\right)N\overline{N}=m_N\frac{log\left(\mathrm{\Lambda }_{QCD}\right)}{<V>}\left(V<V>\right)N\overline{N}$$
(3)
Using the renormalization group dependence of $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{QCD}`$ on $`<V>`$ we find that the approximate strength of the radion nucleon coupling is given by

$$\frac{8\pi ^2}{9g^2}\frac{m_N}{<V>}\left(V<V>\right)\overline{N}N$$
(4)
where $`g`$ is the strong gauge coupling at the scale $`R^1`$. Normalizing the radion kinetic term canonically by defining

$$\mathrm{\Sigma }=2\sqrt{c}\frac{M_4}{<V>}\left(V<V>\right)$$
(5)
we see that the coupling of the canonically normalized radion to the nucleon has the form $`y_N\mathrm{\Sigma }\overline{N}N`$. From the computation above $`y_N\frac{3.7}{\sqrt{c}}\frac{m_N}{M_4}`$. However we have ignored the effects of the light quark masses. Including these has the effect of altering $`y_N`$ by a factor of $`(1\chi )`$ where $`\chi 0.27\pm .08`$ . Therefore our final expression for $`y_N`$ is $`(1\chi )\frac{3.7}{\sqrt{c}}\frac{m_N}{M_4}`$. The radion nucleon coupling mediates a potential between matter that has a strength $`\frac{y_N^2}{4\pi r}\mathrm{exp}(m_Vr)`$. Comparing this to the gravitational potential $`G_N\frac{m_N^2}{r}`$, at short distances the Yukawa force is stronger by a factor P = $`(1\chi )^2\left(\frac{110}{c}\right)`$. For one extra dimension $`c=\frac{3}{2}`$ and the ratio of the radion mediated force to the gravitational force is about $`39\pm 8`$. For two extra dimensions $`c=1`$ and the ratio of the two forces is about $`59\pm 12`$. Violation of the equivalence principle is also proportional to the masses of the light quarks, but is highly suppressed  and is only at the level of a few parts in a thousand.

In this estimate we have neglected corrections to the four dimensional gauge coupling from higher dimensional operators suppressed by powers of the cutoff $`M_{}`$ and from brane localized kinetic and interaction terms. While the effects from higher dimensional operators do not significantly affect the result, the effects of brane localized terms, though volume suppressed, cannot in general be neglected. A quick estimate suggests that the ratio of the contributions to the four dimensional gauge coupling from the bulk terms and the brane localized terms is approximately $`(\pi RM_{}):1`$ for one extra dimension and $`(\pi RM_{})^2:1`$ for two extra dimensions. For two extra dimensions the effect of these terms is typically small. However for one extra dimension and $`RM_{}`$ of order 3 the corrections to P are of order 10 percent. The value of P can be used to distinguish theories with weak scale extra dimensions from other theories that also predict deviations from Newtonian gravity at sub-millimeter distances. These include large extra dimensions , the string dilaton and other string moduli which only get mass after supersymmetry breaking   and axions . Weak scale extra dimensions stabilized by supersymmetry breaking and their implications for sub-millimeter gravity experiments have been considered earlier in ,. For a more complete list of theories which predict deviations from Newtonian gravity see .

In the following sections we investigate in detail the validity of our conclusions above regarding the the radion mass, which were based on naive scaling arguments. We first consider a specific model of radion stabilization based on the Goldberger-Wise mechanism and show how our conclusions naturally emerge. We then consider the dependence of our results on the manner in which the hierarchy problem is solved. Finally we consider the implications of our result for models in which the radion is stabilized using the Casimir energy of the Standard Model in the bulk, and then we conclude.

## 2 Volume Stabilization

In this section we consider in detail a simple model with a single compact extra dimension and show how our earlier conclusions naturally emerge once the volume of the extra dimension is stabilized. The compact direction is orbifolded by $`S^1/Z_2`$ and there are branes at the orbifold fixed points. We use the Goldberger-Wise  mechanism which involves a bulk scalar field with sources on the two branes to stabilize the setup. Our ansatz for the metric is of the form

$$ds^2=g_{\mu \nu }(x)dx^\mu dx^\nu +r(x)^2d\varphi ^2$$
(6)
where $`\varphi `$ is the coordinate along the compact direction and runs from $`\pi `$ to $`\pi `$. It can be shown (see e.g. ) that this ansatz reproduces the correct action for the radion in the four dimensional effective theory. The relevant part of the action for our system can be decomposed as

$$S=S_G+S_M$$
(7)
where $`S_G`$ and $`S_M`$ are the gravitational and scalar field constituents of the action respectively.

$$S_G=d^4x𝑑\varphi \sqrt{G}(2M^3R^{\left(5\right)}\mathrm{\Lambda }_B)\delta (\varphi )\sqrt{g}\mathrm{\Lambda }_1\delta (\varphi \pi )\sqrt{g}\mathrm{\Lambda }_2$$
(8)
$$S_M=d^4x𝑑\varphi \sqrt{G}\frac{1}{2}(_M\psi ^M\psi m^2\psi ^2)+\sqrt{g}F(\psi )\delta (\varphi )+\sqrt{g}H(\psi )\delta (\varphi \pi )$$
(9)
Here $`F(\psi )`$ and $`H(\psi )`$ are in general arbitrary functions of $`\psi `$. For simplicity we will take

$`F(\psi )`$ $`=`$ $`\lambda _1\psi `$ (10)
$`H(\psi )`$ $`=`$ $`\lambda _2\psi `$ (11)
We obtain an approximate solution for the coupled matter gravity system using the method of Goldberger and Wise. We first solve for the scalar field $`\psi `$ in the background metric as a function of $`r`$. We then integrate out the extra dimension to obtain a potential for $`r(x)`$ which can be used to stabilize the extra dimension. The equation of motion for the scalar field is given by

$$r^1_5_5\psi +m^2r\psi =\lambda _1\delta (\varphi )+\lambda _2\delta (\varphi \pi )$$
(12)
The solution (for $`\varphi >0`$) has the form

$$\psi =Aexp\left(mr\varphi \right)+Bexp\left(mr\varphi \right)$$
(13)
where $`A`$ and $`B`$ are given by

$`A`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2m}}{\displaystyle \frac{\lambda _1exp\left(mr\pi \right)+\lambda _2}{2sinh\left(mr\pi \right)}}`$ (14)
$`B`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2m}}{\displaystyle \frac{\lambda _1exp\left(mr\pi \right)+\lambda _2}{2sinh\left(mr\pi \right)}}`$ (15)
Substituting the solution for $`\psi `$ back into the action and performing the integration over the extra dimension we find

$$S_M=d^4x\sqrt{g}\frac{1}{4m}\left(coth\left(mr\pi \right)\left(\lambda _1^2+\lambda _2^2\right)+2\lambda _1\lambda _2cosech\left(mr\pi \right)\right)$$
(16)
Similarly we substitute the expression for the metric into $`S_G`$ and perform the integration over the extra dimension to obtain

$$S_G=d^4x\sqrt{g}\left(4\pi M^3rR^{\left(4\right)}2\pi r\mathrm{\Lambda }_B\mathrm{\Lambda }_4\right)$$
(17)
with $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_4=\mathrm{\Lambda }_1+\mathrm{\Lambda }_2`$. We extremize the non-derivative terms in $`r`$ in the action to find $`<r>`$. At the minimum $`\frac{V\left(r\right)}{r}=0`$ which leads to

$$\frac{\pi }{4}\left[\left(\lambda _1^2+\lambda _2^2\right)cosech^2\left(mr\pi \right)+2\lambda _1\lambda _2cosech\left(mr\pi \right)coth\left(mr\pi \right)\right]+2\pi \mathrm{\Lambda }_B=0$$
(18)
This admits a (local) stable minimum for positive $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_B`$ at large $`\pi mr1`$ provided $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_B\lambda _1^2,\lambda _2^2`$ and the product $`\lambda _1\lambda _2`$ is negative.

To get the action for four dimensional gravity into the canonical form we perform a Weyl rescaling $`g_{\mu \nu }\frac{<r>}{r}g_{\mu \nu }`$. Then the gravity action becomes

$$d^4x\sqrt{g}4\pi M^3rR^{\left(4\right)}=d^4x\sqrt{g}2M_4^2\left(R^{\left(4\right)}+\frac{3}{2V^2}_\mu V^\mu V\right)$$
(19)
where the radion field $`V=2\pi r`$ and the four dimensional Planck scale emerges as $`M_4^2=2\pi M_5^3<r>`$. After putting the kinetic term for the radion into the canonical form it is straightforward to solve for the mass of the radion.

$$m_V^2\frac{m\mathrm{\Lambda }_BV^2}{M_4^2}\frac{\lambda _1\lambda _2V}{M_4^2}$$
(20)
Now if the dynamics which stabilizes the radion does not involve dynamics at scales above the cutoff of the higher dimensional gauge theory $`M_{}`$ then $`\lambda _1\lambda _2M_{}^5`$ which implies $`m_V^2\frac{M_{}^5V}{M_4^2}`$. This is in perfect agreement with our earlier conclusion which was based on dimensional grounds. However if $`\lambda _1\lambda _2M_{}^5`$ then the radion mass can be much heavier than inverse millimeter. We consider the implications of this possibility in the next section.

## 3 The Hierarchy Problem

Under what circumstances is the condition $`\lambda _1\lambda _2M_{}^5`$ satisfied? This is related to the manner in which the hierarchy problem is solved. Consider the situation in which the hierarchy problem is solved as in the Randall-Sundrum model . There is now a warped extra dimension in addition to the compact extra dimension. Models of this type have been considered in . We first consider the situation where the scalar field is confined to the brane where the Standard Model fields live. Then the cutoff on the infrared brane $`M_{}`$ must be around the weak scale to solve the hierarchy problem, and $`\lambda _1\lambda _2M_{}^5`$. Assuming that the radius of the warped extra dimension has been stabilized and has mass of order $`M_{}`$ 111This will be the case if, for example, it is stabilized using the Goldberger-Wise mechanism. we can integrate it out to obtain an effective theory which has the same form as in the five dimensional model considered above, and therefore this theory has a light radion. One may worry that mixing between the radion and the excitation corresponding to the radius of the warped extra dimension may change this result but we have checked that such mixing, though present, is too small to affect our conclusions. If however the scalar field lives on the ultraviolet brane then $`\lambda _1\lambda _2`$ can be as large as $`M_4^5`$ implying a radion much heavier than inverse millimeter. However we see from eqn. (18) that unless the mass $`m`$ of the scalar field is around the weak scale the size of the extra dimension will tend to be at the Planck scale. This suggests that there is a naturalness problem which needs to be addressed in this framework if the radion is to be much heavier than inverse millimeter.

Now consider the situation in which the hierarchy problem is solved by two or more large extra dimensions of radius much larger than the inverse weak scale. The cutoff of the theory $`M_{}`$ must then be at or about the weak scale if the Higgs mass is to be natural. In our model above if the scalar field is localized to the same four brane in the higher dimensional space as the Standard Model fields then $`\lambda _1\lambda _2M_{}^5`$ is automatically satisfied. However the form of the radion kinetic term is more complicated because it can mix with other light scalar fields in higher dimensional gravity theory. If there are N large extra dimensions whose radii $`R_I(x)`$ where $`I`$ runs from 1 to N then there are mixing terms of the form $`_\mu R_I^\nu r`$ in the four dimensional effective theory. However the coefficient of this term before Weyl rescaling is of order $`\frac{M_4^2}{rR_I}`$ which is much less than the coefficient of the $`_\mu r^\mu r`$ term which is of order $`\frac{M_4^2}{r^2}`$. Hence the mixing terms are negligible and our conclusions remain unaffected. But what if the scalar field lives in the bulk? Then however a calculation analogous to the one above shows that the radion potential is now of order $`V_NM_{}^{D+N}V`$ where $`V_N`$ is the volume of the large extra dimensions rather than just $`M_{}^DV`$. This leads to a radion mass which is much larger than inverse millimeter. Thus it is possible for the radion to naturally be much heavier than inverse millimeter if it is stabilized by dynamics involving the bulk of the large extra dimensions.

## 4 Stabilization by Casimir Energy

Finally for concreteness we consider the implications for short distance gravity experiments of a model with one extra dimension stabilized using the Casimir energy of the Standard Model fields which live in the bulk. Since this effect by itself is not quite sufficient for stabilization we add a brane cosmological constant and bulk cosmological constant222Here we are ignoring the effects of brane localized kinetic terms which we expect to be small..

The contribution to the radion potential from the Casimir effect has been computed

$$\mathrm{\Omega }_C\left(V\right)\frac{3N}{4\pi ^2}\frac{1}{V^4}$$
(21)
where the number $`N`$ depends on the number of fields in the bulk and the boundary conditions imposed on them. The contribution to $`N`$ from a bulk vector field is $`3/2`$ while for a bulk fermion $`N=2`$. Every real scalar contributes $`1/2`$ to $`N`$, while the graviton contributes $`5/2`$. Thus for the bulk Standard Model the total $`N68`$. The complete potential including the contributions from the bulk cosmological constant and the brane localized cosmological constant has the form

$$\mathrm{\Omega }\left(V\right)=\mathrm{\Omega }_C\left(V\right)+\alpha V+\beta $$
(22)
Minimizing this potential and requiring that the radion mass be heavier than 50 microns  implies that the radius of the extra dimension must be smaller than about 5 TeV-1. While this result is sensitive not just to the Casimir energy term but also the forms of additional terms in the radion potential, it shows that in general scales as large as several TeV may be accesible to sub-millimeter gravity experiments if the leading contributions to the potential arise from Casimir energy.

## 5 Conclusions

We have investigated theories in which the Standard Model gauge fields propagate in extra dimensions at the weak scale and shown that in a large class of models the radion remains light and has a mass in the $`10^3`$ eV range. The light radion is characteristic of models in which stabilization does not involve scales larger than the cutoff of the higher dimensional Standard Model, and in which the effective theory below the compactification scale is four dimensional. This is generally the case when the hierarchy problem is solved using an additional warped extra dimension and this class of models will typically have a light radion unless the setup is fine tuned. However this is not the case when the hierarchy problem is solved using large extra dimensions, and in such a setup typically a light radion emerges only if the stabilization mechanism does not involve the bulk of the large extra dimensions.

The light radion mediates an attractive force between matter that is comparable to but somewhat stronger than gravity, and violates the Equivalence Principle albeit by a very small amount. The strength of this force is a characteristic of the number of extra dimensions and is less sensitive to other parameters such as the size and cutoff of the extra dimensions. Current short diatance gravity experiments can probe extra dimensions too small to be visible in collider experiments. In particular compactification radii as small as 5 inverse TeV are accessible to current experiments if the extra dimensions are stabilized using the Casimir energy of bulk Standard Model fields. We conclude that a unique opportunity exists to explore physics at the weak scale by performing gravitational experiments at the submillimeter scale.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Eduardo Ponton and Eric Poppitz for discussions at various stages of this work. The authors are supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, of the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC03-76SF00098, and by the National Science Foundation under grant PHY-00-98840.


format: text

text:
# Bose-Einstein Condensates in Magnetic Waveguides

## 1 Introduction

After seven years of research with Bose-Einstein condensates it was now possible to significantly simplify the complexity of the first generation experimental apparatus. In recent experiments condensates have been generated with a duty cycle of only a few seconds Barret01 ; Haensel01 . Furthermore, it was possible to avoid Zeeman slowing techniques Prodan85  or complex combinations of two magneto-optical traps Myatt96  by using a pulsed alkali dispenser source Fortagh98 . With these developements, it is now conceivable to construct a compact and portable apparatus for application oriented experiments with macroscopic atomic matter waves. A breakthrough in this direction has been achieved recently with the successful loading of magnetic microtraps Ott01 ; Haensel01  with Bose-Einstein condensates. In principal, magnetic microtraps allow for the construction of a large variety of trapping potentials. Thus, a growing number of research groups start to explore the possibilities which arise from the combination of micropotentials with degenerate atomic quantum gases Leanhardt02 ; Kasper02 ; Vale02 . Here, we describe in some detail our experimental approach including the apparatus that we use to load a condensate into a magnetic microtrap. First experimental results on outcoupling a condensate from a trap into the waveguide are presented. We comment recent measurements of the lifetime, heating rate and fragmentation of ultracold atomic clouds close to a conductor surface Fortagh02cm . We conclude the article with speculations about future developments to atom optics on a microchip.

## 2 Experimental setup

For studies on ultracold quantum gases in elongated waveguides, we have developed a method for loading a large number of atoms into tightly confining traps at a microstructure. The key feature is the continuous transformation of a rather shallow magnetic potential into the tightly confining geometry of the microtrap Vuletic98 ; Fortagh98prl . The atoms are initially collected in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) and subsequently loaded into the shallow magnetic quadrupole trap employing standard techniques of polarisation gradient cooling and optical pumping. Afterwards, the atoms are adiabatically compressed into the microtrap by gradually transforming the magnetic field. The compression enhances the collision rate and accelerates the thermalisation. When the collision rate is several 10 per second the atomic gas can be efficiently cooled by forced evaporation into the degenerate regime.

The trap setup employed in our experiments is shown in Fig. 1. The microtrap is arranged between the ‘transfer coils’. For the operation of the MOT we use a second pair of coils: the ‘MOT-coils’. The MOT is working in a six beam configuration with beam diameters of 20 mm and 20 mW of laser power in each beam. The separation of the MOT-coils and transfer coils guaranties an undisturbed operation of the MOT and allows for high flexibility in mounting different microtrap geometries. Thus, different microtraps can be loaded by the same transfer scheme. The microstructure with microfabricated current conductors is mounted horizontally upside down below the ‘compression wire’, and the magnetic microtrap is generated below the microstructure. The Ioffe-geometry of the magnetic traps between the transfer coils is provided by combining the magnetic fields of the transfer coils and an additional vertical wire: the ‘Ioffe-wire’ Fortagh00 . The Ioffe-wire passes the transfer coils parallel to their symmetry axis with a lateral displacement of 4 mm. The Ioffe-trap is built in the middle of a semi circular trajectory which connects the centre of the quadrupole field of the transfer coils and the middle of the Ioffe-wire Fortagh00 . This trap can be shifted in its vertical position by varying the currents in the transfer coils. For the transfer into the microtrap, it is necessary that the compression wire and at least one of the microfabricated conductors are oriented parallel to the long axis of the Ioffe-trap and that they are aligned in the plane in which the Ioffe-trap can be shifted up and down.

The trap setup is placed in a vacuum chamber at a base pressure of $`1\times 10^{11}`$ mbar. Ultrahigh vacuum conditions are achieved in a system shown in Fig. 2. The vacuum chamber is pumped by an ion getter pump (80 l/s) and a titanium sublimation pump (2500 l/s) cooled by liquid nitrogen. The configuration of electromagnets and the dispenser sources are mounted at the cover of the vacuum chamber. View ports with antireflexion coating at the side and top of the chamber ensure good optical access to the inside and allow the operation of a six-beam magneto-optical trap. The in-vacuo setup is built by UHV compatible components using OFHC-copper, stainless steel, MACOR, $`\mathrm{Al}_2\mathrm{O}_3`$-ceramics, ceramic glue, and capton insulated copper wires. The dissipated heat during the operation of the microelectromagnets, especially the heat generated by the transfer coils of about 9 W, by the compression wire and Ioffe-wire of 2 W each and the microsized conductors of up to 10 W, is conducted by a copper rod to a liquid nitrogen reservoir outside the chamber. It ensures a constant temperature for the microstructure at approximately $`15^{}`$C which was determined from the measured resistance of the copper conductors. Without cooling, the trap setup warms up, and the lifetime of the atomic clouds is shortened, nevertheless it can still be used for experiments with Bose-Einstein condensates.

As source for thermal rubidium atoms we use a pair of resistively heated dispensers Fortagh98 . The dispensers are located at a distance of 50 mm from the MOT (Fig. 3). They are mounted in a MACOR ceramic plate as shown in Fig. 3b. The ends of the dispensers are bent back at 90 degree and pass through holes in the plate. They are mechanically fixed behind the plate to the copper conductors supplying power. The bending allows for flexing and thermal expansion of the heated metal container. The dispensers are heated by currents of opposite directions to each other. Because of this symmetrical configuration it is possible to avoid a shifting of the MOT position due to the magnetic field of the current flow in the nearby dispensers. If the dispensers are heated by a current of a few amps a thermal rubidium beam is emitted into the trapping region of the MOT (Fig. 3a). A screening wire with 1 mm diameter in front of the rubidium source shields the centre of the MOT and prevents the magneto-optically trapped atoms from direct impact of thermal atoms and other contaminations from the heated area. Without screening, the lifetime of the MOT is strongly reduced due to fast decay processes on a time scale of a few seconds. The screening eliminates the losses and a smooth decay behaviour of the MOT due to the background pressure can be observed.

## 3 The Microstructure

For the current investigations on ultracold atomic gases, the magnetic trap is built at a microstructure consisting of seven 22 mm long parallel copper conductors.

The microfabricated conductors are electroplated on an $`\mathrm{Al}_2\mathrm{O}_3`$ substrate (Fig. 4) and have widths of 30, 11, 3, 3, 3, 11, and 30 $`\mu `$m, respectively. Their nominal separation is $`1\mu `$m and the height of the electroplated copper layer is $`2.5\mu `$m Fortagh02 . The microstructure is mounted onto the surface of the compression wire, with theconductors oriented parallel to the compression wire. For reference measurements, a thin copper wire with a diameter of $`90\mu `$m and a length of 25 mm is mounted parallel to the microstructure. It can be used alternatively to the conductors at the microstructure for generating a linear microtrap Fortagh02cm . The vertical distance between the middle of the compression wire and the microfabricated conductors is 1.8 mm and the distance between the middle of the compression wire and the thin wire is 2.0 mm.

The combination of linear conductors and a bias field perpendicular to the axis of the conductor enables a large variety of radial trap geometries to be built. In the simplest case, several conductors are driven with currents in the same direction and the trap is generated by applying an additional bias field perpendicular to the conductors (Fig. 5a). An additional axial offset field provides the parabolic potential shape in the centre of the waveguide.

Turning off the outer conductors shifts the position of the trap closer to the inner conductor (Fig. 5b) and increases the radial gradient. The depth of the magnetic trap is determined by the bias field applied perpendicular to the conductors and does not change during the compression. The trap can be further compressed by inverting the currents in the neighbouring conductors (Fig. 5c). Calculations with the measured maximum current densities in the microconductors Fortagh02  predict a maximal possible radial oscillation frequency of $`2\pi \times \mathrm{600\hspace{0.17em}000}`$Hz. Starting with standard trap parameters for Bose-Einstein condensation ($`\omega _\mathrm{r}=2\pi \times 300`$Hz and $`\omega _\mathrm{a}=2\pi \times 14`$Hz radial and axial oscillation frequencies, respectively), it should be possible to change the aspect ratio of the trap about three orders of magnitude. A further application of parallel current conductors is the construction of parallel waveguides Hinds01 . The waveguides can be arranged horizontally or vertically to each other depending on the strength of the applied bias field (Fig. 5d and 5e). If the bias field is oriented exactly parallel to the plane defined by the conductors, the trajectories of the trap centres cross each other while changing the bias field and the waveguides can be merged and separated.

## 4 Experimental cycle

At the begining of the experiment the MOT is loaded within 25 s from pulsed thermal dispenser sources. Thereby, $`3\times 10^8`$ 87Rb atoms are collected at a temperature of $`50\mu `$K. During the first 12 seconds, the dispensers are heated by a constant current pulse of 6.5 A. For the next 13 seconds, the dispensers are turned off and the MOT is loaded from the thermal rubidium beam and the residual vapour. The time evolution of the number of atoms and their lifetime is shown in Fig. 6. Approximately seven seconds after switching on the heating current, the dispensers reach the dissociation temperature of rubidium and the emission starts. The local pressure of rubidium grows and the MOT is loaded on a time scale within its lifetime. After switching off the heating, the dispensers rapidly cool down below the dissociation temperature,

predominantly due to thermal radiation Fortagh98 . Within the next few seconds, the rubidium vapour is pumped out and the initial trap lifetime of about 60 s is recovered. The data points in Fig. 6a and Fig. 6b have been measured in separate experimental cycles. The number of atoms was detected by absorption imaging.

The preparation of ultracold atoms in the MOT is finished by 10 ms polarisation gradient cooling. Then, the atoms are optically pumped into the $`|\mathrm{F}=2,\mathrm{m}_\mathrm{F}=2>`$ hyperfine ground state and a $`60\mu `$K cold cloud of $`2\times 10^8`$ atoms is loaded into the spherical quadrupole trap formed by the MOT-coils at a field gradient of 45 G/cm. Because the MOT-coils and the transfer coils overlap, an adiabatic transfer of the magnetically trapped atoms can be performed: the quadrupole potential minimum moves on a straight line from the centre of the MOT-coils to the centre of the transfer coils. At a current of 3 A the transfer coils generate a spherical quadrupole field with a gradient of 58 G/cm along the symmetry axis. By increasing the current in the Ioffe-wire, the centre of the spherical quadrupole is shifted and transformed into a Ioffe-type trapping field Fortagh00 . At a current of 13 A in the Ioffe-wire the resulting harmonic trap potential is characterised by its axial oscillation frequency of $`\omega _\mathrm{a}=2\pi \times 14`$Hz, its radial oscillation frequency of $`\omega _\mathrm{r}=2\pi \times 110`$Hz, and the offset field of 0.4 G in the middle of the trap. In this Ioffe-type trap the atoms are cooled for 20 s by radio frequency evaporation to a temperature of $`5\mu `$K. In this large volume Ioffe-trap, condensation can be reached with approximately $`2\times 10^4`$ atoms if the cloud is cooled for a further 10 s. However, the transfer into the microtrap offers more advantageous conditions for condensation.

Therefore, after $`20`$s of precooling in the large volume Ioffe-trap, the ensemble is compressed adiabatically into the microtrap by reducing the current in the upper transfer coil. This shifts the trap minimum to the microstructure (Fig. 7). For a tighter confinement of the cloud in the microtrap, a current in the compression wire can be applied.

Good conditions for Bose-Einstein condensation have been achieved for a large range of radial oscillation frequencies between $`\omega _\mathrm{r}=2\pi \times 200`$Hz and $`2\pi \times \mathrm{2\hspace{0.17em}000}`$Hz. The axial confinement is determined by the Ioffe-trap to $`\omega _\mathrm{a}=2\pi \times 14`$Hz in all experiments. The compression from the Ioffe-trap into the microtrap takes place within 1 s and is completed by applying the current in the compression wire. During the transfer and compression the radio frequency is turned off. The compression heats the atomic cloud by a factor of up to 7 and boosts the elastic collision rate to several hundred per second. By now ramping down the radio frequency from 5 MHz to about 1 MHz within 5 s we reach condensation with up to $`1\times 10^6`$ atoms at a critical temperature of typically between 500 nK and $`1\mu `$K Ott01 .

The radial confinement of an elongated trap is determined in principal by the current in the microconductor and the compression wire Fortagh02cm . However, additional bias fields from the Ioffe-wire and the transfer coils can significantly modify this value. Therefore, we measure the exact trap frequencies by sinusoidal perturbating the trapping potential and observing the temperature of the thermal cloud. To complete the characterisation of the trap, we measure the bias field in the centre of the trap by removing all the atoms via rf-outcoupling.

The parameters of the Bose-Einstein condensate such as the number of atoms, the chemical potential and the density are derived from absorption images after several milliseconds time of flight. Condensates in tightly confining traps are generated at high densities of about $`10^{15}\mathrm{cm}^3`$. Due to inelastic three body losses Burt97  the lifetime is in the order of a hundred millisecond. By reducing the density, the lifetime of the condensate can be enhanced up to several seconds in which subsequent investigations on the Bose-Einstein condensate can be performed Fortagh02cm . Thereby, magnetic microtraps allow a fast and versatile manipulation of the quantum gas. Altogether, the experimental cycle requires approximately one minute.

## 5 Experiments

In applications on microtraps, the propagation of condensates in waveguides is of particular interest. An atomic beam could be guided from an on-chip atom laser to an experimental facility. For this reason an understanding of the outcoupling process from a trap into a waveguide and the physical properties of propagating condensates is required. We have started to study experimental scenarios where the condensate is released into a waveguide. Beginning with a condensate in a trap, characterized by the radial and axial oscillation frequencies of $`\omega _\mathrm{r}=2\pi \times 500`$Hz and $`\omega _a=2\pi \times 14`$Hz, respectively, the axial confinement was turned off linearly within 0.4 s. An additional gradient field was turned on parallel to the guide axis which forces the condensate into the waveguide.

In Fig. 8a five steps of the process are shown: the first image shows the condensate released from the initial trap after 23 ms time of flight. The condensate expands mostly in radial direction according to the tight confinement and high interaction energy. 0.35 s later, the axial confinement is already strongly reduced and the smaller radial size of the expanded condensate in the time of flight image indicates a decreased interaction energie. After 0.35 s the axial opening of the trap is no longer adiabatic due to the extreme low axial trap frequencies. 15 ms before the axial confinement is completely turned off, the condensate is released from the initial trap ($`t=385`$ms). The third image shows the condensate after 65 ms of propagation in the waveguide. The condensate still expands axially. Due to the external gradient field, it is accelerated by $`0.38\mathrm{m}/\mathrm{s}^2`$. After 125 ms of propagation, it reaches a velocity of 48 mm/s. Fig. 8b shows the evolution of the expanded radial and axial width of the condensate after 23 ms time of flight during the expansion process. The radial width of the condensate decreases as the axial expansion lowers the density and the chemical potential. The straight lines in Fig. 8b are a numerical simulation of the radial and axial halflenghts of the condensate. The simulation is based on the scaling equations for a condensate in a time-dependent harmonic trap Castin96 ; Kagan97 . The trap was assumed to be at rest, while the axial curvature was linearly ramped down within 0.4 s. The centre of mass motion is decoupled from the inner excitations of the condensate which are well described by the theory. Note, that there is no fitting parameter in the theory. In future experiments, a detailed study of dynamics and coherence properties of elongated condensates and propagating beams may become feasible.

In recent experiments, the heating rate and the lifetime have been investigated on atomic clouds at small distances ($`20300\mu `$m) to the surface of the microtrap Fortagh02cm . It has been shown that the heating rate remains at each distances below 400 nK/s whereas the lifetime experience a reduction when approaching the surface. At a distance of $`200\mu `$m we measured a lifetime of 13 s which is reduced almost linearly to 2 s when the distance was reduced to $`30\mu `$m. However, the most peculiar effect which appears if atoms are moved into traps close to the surface of the conductor, is a fragmentation of the cloud along the conductor Fortagh02cm . The fragmentation can be observed on ultracold and on condensed clouds. We have made the observations at the thin copper wire as well as along each microfabricated conductor. Fig. 9 shows the fragmentation of an expanding atomic cloud in a waveguide. These experiments indicate the general appearance of a periodic potential structure along current carrying copper conductors. The most probable structuring potential type is a magnetic one. Because an explanation of having a periodic structure of ferromagnetic contaminations on the conductors of different origin seems to be unlikely, we speculate whether the modulation corresponds to spin arrangements of moving electrons, a topic which is investigated be the research field of spintronics Sarma99 . Meanwhile, the observations discussed above could be reproduced by two other groups Leanhardt02 ; Vale02  working on microtraps with copper conductors.

## 6 Outlook

Trapping and manipulating atoms in magnetic microtraps is a very young field and it is difficult to make predictions about future developments. Nevertheless, one can speculate about future research topics. The experiments presented in Fortagh02cm  show a strong influence of a nearby surface on a condensate. This suggests the use of the condensate as a probe to study an arbitrary surface. The sample surface can be either metallic or dielectric or a combination of both. Electric or magnetic surface forces, acting on the condensate will structure its density distribution. This can be observed with a variety of well established imaging techniques. In this case the resolution is limited by the imaging system to the micron range. A better resolution may be achieved by imaging the condensate after some milliseconds of free expansion in the gravitational field. Since such ‘time of flight images’ reflect the initial velocity distribution of the condensates, they would provide information about the phase gradients inside the condensate as imprinted by the surface under investigation. Such an approach can be regarded as an extension of recent experiments with condensates in three dimensional optical lattices Greiner01 . By adiabatically reducing the lattice potential followed by a ballistic expansion, it was possible to directly image the population of the energy bands within the first Brillouin-zone. The size of the Brillouin-zone increases with decreasing lattice constant which means that the size of the time of flight images increases with decreasing size of the periodic structure. The limited resolution of the imaging system can be overcome in this way. By decomposing an arbitrary surface potential into periodic Fourier components one may be able to develop a novel kind of holographic surface microscope. These experiments can readily be done in a conventional Bose-Einstein apparatus by mounting a sample surface close to the centre of the magnetic trap and shifting the condensate towards the surface by varying the magnetic field of the trap in an appropriate way.

Another fascinating topic for future research with microtraps is the development of elements for integrated atom optical devices. If condensates can be split and recombined with temporal or spatial beam splitters it is conceivable to construct interferometers that are sensitive to rotations and forces review . Micropotentials can also be used to control the relative position between different atomic clouds or even single atoms. This allows for a tunable interaction between atoms and can be used for novel approaches to construct quantum gatesJaksch99 .

In general, it appears that the generic dynamical process in magnetic micro potentials would be an oscillation rather than a current as in electronic circuits. Functional units may thus be envisioned as being constructed from oscillations that are conditionally coupled via their phase or amplitude. Quantum computers and other ‘atom chip’ devices may turn out to be a sophisticated combination of such ‘computons’. In our experiment we have observed centre of mass oscillations of condensates with a very large quality factor. After suddenly shifting the minimum of the trapping potential that contains a condensate the resulting sloshing mode can be observed for several seconds. Its frequency of 7.9 Hz is determined with an relative error of $`7\times 10^4`$ by fitting the data to a sine function. Although half of the atoms are lost during the experiment the oscillation amplitude is undamped within the uncertainty of the measurement and we estimate the quality factor of the oscillation to be better than $`\mathrm{10\hspace{0.17em}000}`$. Magnetic microtrap potentials can be shaped in almost arbitrary ways such that nonlinear oscillations can be easily studied. In such potentials the centre of mass motion is coupled to collective excitations of the condensate and provides a periodic drive for the condensate shape oscillation. For the future it will certainly be interesting to investigate the dynamics of such a nonlinear system and study its suitability for the construction of atomic devices.

## 7 Acknowledgements

We thank G. Schlotterbeck, B. Herzog, and D. Wharam for the production of the microstructure, G. Ritt and M. Ruder for the imaging software, S. Günther and C. Silber for numerical calculations, L. Borda for calculations on 1D systems, and G. Mihaly for discussions about spintronics. This work was supported in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Grant No. Zi 419/3.


text:
# Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930 – 2002): A Portrait of a Genius

## Scientific Career

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was born in Rotterdam May 11, 1930. His mother was a mathematician and father a chemist. In 1956 he graduated from the University of Leiden in mathematics and theoretical physics. In 1959 he received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam for his thesis titled “Communication with an Automatic Computer” devoted to a description of the assembly language designed for the first commercial computer developed in the Netherlands, the X1. It also dealt with the concept of an interrrupt, a novelty at that time. His PhD thesis supervisor was Aad van Wijngaarden.

From 1952 till 1962 he worked at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam where he met his wife Ria. In 1962 they moved to Eindhoven where he became professor at the Mathematics Department at the Technical University of Eindhoven. Then in 1964 they moved to a newly built house in Nuenen, a small village on the outskirts of Eindhoven which in 1973 was added to the world map of computer science when Dijkstra started to circulate his reports signed “Burroughs Research Fellow” with his home address. Many thought that Burroughs, a company known at that time for the production of computers based on an innovative hardware architecture, was based in Nuenen. In fact, Dijkstra was the only research fellow of Burroughs Corporation and worked for it from home, occasionally traveling to its branches in the USA.

As a result he reduced his appointment at the University to one day a week. This day, Tuesday, soon became known as the day of the famous “Tuesday Afternoon Club”, a seminar during which he discussed with his colleagues scientific articles, looking at all aspects – notation, organization, presentation, language, content, etc. Soon after he moved in 1984 to the University of Austin, Texas, USA, a new “branch” of the Tuesday Afternoon Club emerged in Austin. Dijkstra worked in Austin till his retirement in the fall of 1999. He returned from Austin, terminally ill, to his original house in Nuenen in February 2002, where he died half a year later, on August 6th. He is survived by his wife and three children, Marcus, Femke and Rutger.

## Scientific Contributions

Through his fundamental contributions Dijkstra shaped and influenced the field of computer science like no other scientist. His groundbreaking contributions ranged from the engineering side of computer science to the theoretical one and covered several areas including compiler construction, operating systems, distributed systems, sequential and concurrent programming, software engineering, and graph algorithms. Many of his papers, often just a few pages long, are the source of whole new research areas. Even more, several concepts that are now completely standard in computer science were first identified by Dijkstra and bear names coined by him.

Examples abound. In 1959 he published in a 3-page long article “A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs” the celebrated, supremely simple, algorithm to find the shortest path in a graph, now called Dijkstra’s algorithm. Its impact over the next forty years is best summarized by the following quotation from the article of Mikkel Thorup, “Undirected Single-Source Shortest Paths with Positive Integer Weights in Linear Time”, from Journal of the ACM 46(3), pp.362-394, 1999:

> “Since 1959, all theoretical developments in SSSP \[Single-Source Shortest Paths\] for general directed and undirected graphs have been based on Dijkstra’s algorithm.”

Following Fortran, ALGOL 60 was the second high-level programming language. Dijkstra was closely involved in the ALGOL 60 development, realization and popularization. As discussed by Peter Naur in the article “The European side of the last phase of the development of ALGOL 60”, in the Proceedings of the first ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages, January 1978, Dijkstra took part in the period 1958–1959 in a number of meetings that culminated in the publication of the report defining the ALGOL 60 language. Dijkstra’s name does not appear in the list of thirteen authors of the final report. Apparently, he eventually left the committee because he could not agree with the majority opinions. Still, while at the Mathematisch Centrum, he wrote jointly with Jaap Zonneveld the first ALGOL 60 compiler. It employed a novel method for implementing recursion. His short book “Primer of Algol 60 Programming”, originally published in 1962, was for several years the standard reference for the language.

In a one page paper from 1965 he introduced the “mutual exclusion problem” for $`n`$ processes and discussed a solution to it. It was probably the first published concurrent algorithm. The notion, standard by now, of a “critical section” was also introduced in this paper. The 1986 book by Michel Raynal, titled “Algorithms for Mutual Exclusion”, shows what impact this single page had on the field in the first twenty years since it was published.

Dijkstra and his colleagues in Eindhoven also designed and implemented THE (standing for “Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven”) operating system, which was organized into clearly identified layers. His 1968 article on this subject provided the foundation for all subsequent designs of the operating systems.

In 1968 Dijkstra published his famous paper “Cooperating Sequential Processes”, a 70-page essay that originated the field of concurrent programming. He discussed in it the notion of mutual exclusion and the criteria a satisfactory solution should satisfy. He also redressed the historical perspective left out of his 1965 paper by including the first solution to the mutual exclusion problem, for 2 processes, due to Th.J. Dekker. Further, he proposed the first synchronization mechanism for concurrent processes, the semaphore with its two operations, P and V. He also identified the “deadlock problem” (called there “the problem of the deadly embrace”) and proposed an elegant “Banker’s algorithm” that prevents deadlock. The deadlock detection and prevention became perennial research problems in the field of concurrent programming.

Several of these ideas were conceived by him much earlier. For example, he introduced the concept of a semaphore already in 1962. It is discussed in his manuscript EWD 51, “Multiprogrammering en X8” (Multiprogramming and X8) written in Dutch, see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd00xx/EWD51.PDF. The P and V operations are abbreviations for “Prolaag”, a non-existing Dutch word that stands for “lower” (in Dutch “lower” is “verlaag”) and for “Verhogen”, a Dutch word for “raise”. In turn, the “Banker’s algorithm” appeared in his manuscript EWD 108, “Een algorithme ter voorkoming van de dodelijke omarming” (An algorithm to prevent the deadly embrace) written in Dutch, see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd01xx/EWD108.PDF. Also, the paper “Cooperating Sequential Processes” was finalized in 1965 and was available as his manuscript EWD 123, see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd01xx/EWD123.PDF.

Then, in a 1971 paper he illustrated the deadlock problem by means of the “dining philosophers problem” according to which five philosophers, seated around a table, are supposed to eat spaghetti sharing only five forks. This problem became a classic benchmark for explaining new synchronization primitives. The paper also led to an intense research for high-level synchronization mechanisms, leading eventually to the concept of a monitor, due to Per Brinch Hansen and Tony Hoare.

His two-page article “Self-stabilizing systems in spite of distributed control” from 1974 is at the source of one of the main approaches to fault tolerant computing, as can be seen by studying the book “Self-stabilization” (the name was coined by Dijkstra) of Shlomi Dolev from 2000 and by browsing through the proceedings of the annual workshops on self-stabilizing systems. Interestingly, the paper was noticed only in 1983, after Leslie Lamport stressed its importance in his invited talk at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC). It won the 2002 PODC significant paper award.

Dijkstra had the audacity to criticize the customary “if-then-else” programming statement as asymmetric and proposed in 1975 instead another, symmetric, construct based on the notion of a “guard”. This allowed him to present the more than 2300 years old Euclid’s algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor of two natural numbers in an aesthetically pleasing symmetric form. Since then the concept of a guard spread deeply inside computer science.

In 1976 he published a seminal book “A Discipline of Programming” which put forward his method of systematic development of programs together with their correctness proofs. In his exposition he used his tiny “guarded commands” language. The language, with its reliance on nondeterminism, the adopted weakest pre-condition semantics, and the proposed development method has had a huge impact on the field till this day.

In 1984, to add further support to this approach to programming, he published jointly with Wim Feijen an introductory textbook for first year students of computer science. The book, first published in Dutch, was titled “Een methode van programmeren”. The English edition appeared in 1988 as “A Method of Programming”.

In the early eighties he published two small papers on the problem of detecting termination in distributed systems. The first one, 4 pages long, was written with Carel Scholten, the second, 3 pages long, with Wim Feijen and Netty van Gasteren. The problem was independently formulated and solved by Nissim Francez in a more restricted setting of CSP programs. It became one of the most often studied problems in the area of distributed programming and a number of surveys on the subject appeared.

Then in 1990 he published his book “Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics” with Carel Scholten. The book was devoted to logical and mathematical analysis of his weakest precondition semantics with a long prelude concerning predicate calculus. However, the book received mixed reviews. We shall return to this matter later.

His fundamental achievements were early recognized. Already in 1972 he obtained the ACM Turing award. He was a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and held the doctor honoris causa titles from the Universities of Belfast, Northern Ireland and Athens, Greece. In addition, over the period of thirty years, he received numerous awards and distinctions, some just a couple of weeks before his death. On April 10, 2001, the Dutch television broadcast a half an hour TV program about Dijkstra, which was very favourably reviewed in the main daily, the NRC Handelsblad.

Not surprisingly, his obituary appeared in a number of newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Guardian.

## Working Style

Dijkstra never wrote his articles using a computer. He preferred to rely on his typewriter and later on his Mont Blanc fountain pen. These articles were then distributed in an old fashioned way: he sent copies to a few friends and associates who then served as the source nodes of the distribution centers. These short articles span over the period of forty years. They are rarely longer than 15 pages and are consecutively numbered. The last one, No 1318 is from April 14, 2002. Within computer science they are known as the EWD-reports, or, simply the EWD’s. The early ones are not dated so it is difficult to ascertain their publication date.

A major change occurred when as part of the celebration of his 70th birthday, the computer science department in Austin issued in 2000 a CD-rom with most of the EWD-reports. They are also available from the website http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ maintained by Ham Richards, with the more recent reports added. This huge amount of material, in total over 7700 pages, consists of scientific articles, essays, position papers, conference and scientific trip reports, open letters, speeches, and lately, increasingly often, elegant expositions of solutions to well-known and less well-known combinatorial problems and puzzles.

Dijkstra applied to his work a rigorous self-assessment procedure and only a small fraction of the EWD’s were eventually submitted to refereed journals. As a result many of his contributions are not well-known.

His handwriting was so perfect and distinct that in the late eighties Luca Cardelli, then from the DEC Systems Research Center, designed a “Dijkstra” font for Macintosh computers. Soon after, Dijkstra got a letter typeset in this font and thought it was handwritten until news reached him about the creation of this font. Some of Dijkstra’s colleagues occasionally used this font in their slide presentations during the departmental meetings in Austin. Those curious to see his striking handwriting and his extraordinarily elegant exposition style can download for example his presentation of the perennial wolf, goat and cabbage puzzle (see EWD 1255 from 2000).

In writing his elegance was unmatched. He could write about formal issues in the form of an essay, with hardly any formulas. His, already discussed, paper “Cooperating Sequential Processes” is perhaps the best example. Similarly, he was able to discuss (one should rather say, derive) intricate algorithms in distributed computing in a seemingly informal way, in plain prose, with just a few simple formulas. He wrote his articles in a unique style characterized by conciseness, economy of argument, and clarity of exposition. Each sentence was carefully chiseled. Each paragraph was striking.

In fact, in all that he did he was a perfectionist to the utmost. His lectures were always impeccably delivered, often with a sense of unique drama, and given only with a chalk and a blackboard, completely out of his head. They were also highly entertaining because of his sharp comments, striking turns of phrase, or curious quotations that he used to put on the blackboard before starting his lecture. In a classroom he would never ask an audience to keep silent. Instead, he would lower his voice to the point of being hardly audible. This trick was amazingly effective.

Starting in the late seventies he got interested in the subject of the development and presentation of proofs. Some of these proofs were surprising applications of his programming methodology to geometry or algebra. He criticized the use of implication, an unneeded reasoning by cases, or the reasoning by contradiction. Instead, he favoured the proofs presented as chains of equivalences with each step justified as an interlaced comment, and liked to stress the fact that the equivalence is associative, a fact that logicians knew but apparently never used.

He also designed his own notation for first-order logic that took better care of the quantifiers with explicitly given ranges and in general thought nothing of mathematicians’ disdain for presentation and lack of attention to the notation. He even criticized the familiar use of the $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ for summation as sloppy and misleading. Moreover, he repeatedly argued for numbering starting from zero, so his reports, from a certain moment on, invariably begin with page 0, and when he was writing about $`n`$ processes, they were invariably numbered $`0,\mathrm{},n1`$. Also, he opposed using drawings or examples to illustrate concepts, for example specific type of graphs.

## His Opinions

In personal contacts with colleagues, he tended to appear stiff, austere and aloof. On some rare occasions he was even plainly rude, like in the early eighties when in Utrecht he demonstratively left in the middle of a lecture on computer networks given by a prominent computer scientist from the Free University of Amsterdam, but only after having bombarded him with questions about terminology. Several years later, in Austin, he said “Thank God” in reaction to a comment “I am losing my voice” uttered by a renowned computer scientist from the MIT toward the end of her lecture. (A letter with apologies from the department chairman promptly followed.) But in informal, private meetings in his office, he could be most charming, serving coffee to students and making subtle one liner jokes of his own creation.

As a result of his reserved behaviour and uncompromising positions he was disliked by a number of colleagues, in particular in the Netherlands. They saw nothing in his prophet-like statements and biting comments, often delivered from the back of the lecture room, and directed against the hacker’s approach to programming, against the sloppily chosen notation, or expressing his disapproval of the badly organized lecture. Often this scepticism towards his opinions and ideas could be simply explained by plain jealousy that his viewpoints and articles were widely cited and discussed. Consequently, when a prominent speaker was sought for some important event in the Netherlands, Dijkstra was usually passed over.

On a number of occasions, his extreme views became the standard currency several years later. For example, in 1968 he published a two-page note “Goto considered harmful” that criticized the use of the goto statement in programming languages. It led to a huge uproar. Thirty years later the goto statement shines by its absence in Java, and the title “idea x or construct y considered harmful” has been borrowed several times, most recently in an article in the Communications of the ACM Vol. 45 (8), 2002.

His opinions on programming were often sharply criticized and hotly debated, but they paved the way for the increased attention to programming methodologies and use of formal methods for verifying software for “critical applications”, and contributed early to a better understanding of the complexity involved in the programming process. In the end, if a spokesman was sought to elucidate the problems of the “software crisis”, the eyes turned invariably towards Dijkstra.

Dijkstra enriched our vocabulary by numerous other terms, phrases and slogans. The widely used term “structured programming” was coined in his elegant “Notes on Structured Programming” from 1972. Another slogan, “separation of concerns”, so often used in software engineering, goes back to his short note “On the role of scientific thought” from 1974 (EWD 447).

He could formulate his opinions with utmost clarity and with a razor-sharp precision, so they lent themselves naturally to be used as mottos to book chapters or articles, or as a justification for a new line of research. One could easily publish a booklet with his aphorisms and strikingly refreshing statements about computers, software, or computer science.

These opinions could also lead to strong opposition from other computer scientists, including prominent ones. Don Knuth wrote in 1974 a 40 pages long article titled “Structured Programming with goto Statements”. Dijkstra’s views on teaching computer science, presented during the ACM Computer Science Conference in February 1989 in a talk titled “On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science” led to a publication in the Communications of the ACM Vol. 32 (12), 1989 of “A debate on teaching computing science”. In this issue Richard Karp, Richard Hamming and other prominent computer scientists criticized his opinions as too extreme and too radical, in particular because of his insistence that an introductory course in programming should be primarily a course in formal mathematics, completely free of program testing.

It should be also added that on some occasions Dijkstra’s lack of reception of new ideas seemed to stem from his inability to see through a notation he disliked, his rejection of correctness proofs based on operational reasoning (by this yardstick temporal logic was “out”), or from his resistance to absorb ideas that were presented in a highly technical form. Also, on a couple of occasions, his refusal to acquaint himself with the basic literature in mathematical logic led him astray, like his “discovery” that equivalence is associative.

In fact, his and Scholten’s book “Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics” received a devastating review by Egon Börger in Science of Computer Programming 23 (1994), pp. 1-11. Börger showed how several laws of propositional calculus, the proofs of which are “spiced with pompous methodological comments”, can be proved in a completely straightforward way using the approach of I.I. Shegalkin from 1928, in which each Boolean expression is represented as a polynomial with the coefficients 0 or 1. Börger also harshly criticized the highly biased account of the development of predicate logic in which only selected few logicians were mentioned and in which a straight line was drawn from Leibniz, through Boole to the authors. To be fair, one should mention here that Dijkstra’s and Scholten’s approach to proof presentation, together with a work of others, also led to a development of what is now known as “calculational logic”.

Such a cavalier approach to references was one of the reasons why some colleagues resented Dijkstra. In fact, bibliographic references were never a strong point of Dijkstra’s work, and most of his articles and books have no references at all. In the preface of his book “A Discipline of Programming” he simply stated disarmingly “For the absence of a bibliography I offer neither explanation nor apology”.

All that was probably the small price he had to pay for being able to focus on his own ideas and his own approach. After all, in most of what he did he was a pioneer and consequently an autodidact. Apparently, to remain creative and highly original he had to shut off other people’s work. He would rather derive all results from first principles, ignoring work done by others. He was more interested in the thought process behind the development of a result, rather than the result itself. In fact, most of his work has dealt with methodology.

His strong personality combined with remarkable working habits and definite opinions on how to conduct research appealed to many researchers. He seemed to believe that everyone should think, and even behave, the way he did. This made him a natural prophet and accounted for many of his idiosyncrasies. He attracted a relatively small but stable group of disciples, which included both PhD students and highly renowned computer scientists, who adopted his writing style and notation, his manners, use of a fountain pen, and occasionally even his type of sandals.

## Life in Austin

In Austin he found his second home. He liked the United States and its national parks and often spent vacation traveling around with his wife in their Volkswagen bus, dubbed the Turing Machine. When operating on familiar territory, he was sociable and friendly. He and his wife would often drop in on friends and colleagues in the evening, unannounced, for a social half hour. He was also often most helpful and with an original sense of humour. When asked once how many PhD students he had, he replied with a smile: “Two. Einstein had none”. (Eventually, Dijkstra had four PhD students: Nico Haberman, who for several years was the head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, Martin Rem, who became the president of the Technical University of Eindhoven, Netty van Gasteren, who till her recent untimely death worked at the same University, and David Naumann who works at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, NJ and who had Dijkstra and Tony Hoare as PhD supervisors.)

He was liked and respected by his colleagues, who were struck by his unassuming behaviour. J Strother Moore once remarked about Dijkstra’s collegial attitude during departmental meetings: “Edsger is a great faculty member. He believes in the principle ‘one person, one vote’ and sticks to it”. In fact, Dijkstra never mingled in university politics and always stayed outside of conflicts. At the same time he was extremely perceptive about people and could immediately recognize who was a dedicated scientist and who was a disguised politician.

He often attended lectures of invited speakers and would do his best to closely follow them till the very end. His courses for students in Austin had little to do with computer science: they dealt with the presentation of mathematical proofs. Actually, on the Department’s home page, one could read the following terse summary of his research: “ My area of interest focuses on the streamlining of the mathematical argument so as to increase our powers of reasoning, in particular, by the use of formal techniques”. During the course he would ask students to write up proofs of the elementary mathematical problems he discussed during the class and next time he returned them with detailed comments such as “Many sins of omissions”.

He was also highly original in his way of assessing people’s capacity for a job. When Vladimir Lifschitz came to Austin in 1990 for a job interview, Dijkstra gave him a puzzle. Vladimir solved it and has been working in Austin since then.

Dijkstra’s scientific life in Austin was very different from a typical computer science researcher. To my knowledge he never submitted a research grant proposal, did not participate in any conference program committee, and did not attend a conference unless as an invited speaker. He read scientific articles mostly by recommendation and preferred to rely on direct communication with a small group of colleagues which included some of the most famous computer scientists. In fact, with many colleagues and friends he maintained a letter correspondence that occasionally would span a couple of decades. He started to use email just a couple of years ago, relying before then on fax and handwritten letters as means of communication.

## Lifestyle

As a scientist Dijkstra was a model of honesty and integrity. Most of his publications were written by him alone. The few publications that he wrote jointly with his colleagues bear the unmistakable trait of his writing style. He never had a secretary and took care of all his correspondence alone. He never sought funds in the form of grants or consulting and never lent his name to the initiatives to which he would not contribute in a substantial way. When colleagues prepared a festschrift for his sixtieth birthday, published by Springer-Verlag, he took the trouble to thank each of the sixty one contributors separately, in a hand-written letter.

His supreme self-confidence went together with a remarkably modest life style, to the point of being spartan. His and his wife’s house in Nuenen is simple, small and unassuming. He did not own a TV, a VCR, or a mobile telephone and did not go to the movies. In contrast, he played the piano remarkably well and, while in Austin, liked to go to the concerts. He also liked to tackle difficult crossword puzzles in Dutch and would not hesitate to send his solutions to the newspaper.

## Legacy

Dijkstra’s immense intellectual courage and audacity, and deep, yet strikingly simple and elegant, ideas changed the course of computer science. His integrity as a scientist and as a person in private life cannot be matched. His views on science in general and on research in particular were of remarkable depth and originality. As J Strother Moore, the chairman of the Computing Science Department at Austin, said during Dijkstra’s funeral: “He was like a man with a light in the darkness. He illuminated virtually every issue he discussed.” In short, he was a genius. In computer science we are all Dijkstra’s children.

## Acknowledgements

Ria Dijkstra made us aware that several concepts were introduced by Dijkstra considerably earlier. Wim Feijen, David Gries and Paul Vitányi offered critical comments on the initial version and supplied useful corrections and additional information. Leslie Lamport provided helpful historical comments.