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Persistence of a Non-Equilibrium State: Observation of a Boltzmannian Special Case

Well before the atomistic nature of matter was experimentally established, Ludwig Boltzmann's audacious effort to explain the macroscopic world of human experience in terms of the workings of an unseen microscopic world met with vigorous opposition. A contentious point was the problem of irreversibility: the microscopic equations of motion are reversible, yet friction and viscosity cause things always to slow down and warm up, never to speed up and cool down. What was worse, Boltzmann himself discovered that his transport equation predicts special cases in which gases never come to thermal equilibrium, a particular example being that the monopole "breathe" mode of gas will never damp if it is confined in 3D to a perfectly isotropic harmonic potential. Such absences of damping were not observed in nature. Nondamping of a monopole mode in lower dimensional systems has only very recently been observed, using cold atoms. Kinoshita et al. and Chevy et al. have experimentally observed suppressed relaxation in highly elongated geometries. The difficulty in generating sufficiently spherical harmonic confinement for ultracold atoms, however, has meant that Boltzmann's fully 3D, isotropic case has never been observed. With the development of a new magnetic trap capable of producing near-spherical harmonic confinement for ultracold atoms, we have been able to make the first observation of this historically significant oddity. We observe a monopole mode for which the collisional contribution to damping vanishes, a long-delayed vindication for Boltzmann's microscopic theory.