Tag: Ultracold Atoms

  • Nation & World

    Tiny tweezers

    Using precisely focused lasers that act as “optical tweezers,” Harvard scientists have been able to capture and control individual ultracold molecules – the eventual building-blocks of a quantum computer – and study the collisions between them in more detail than ever before.

    5 minutes
    optical tweezers in use
  • Nation & World

    Quantum gas microscope created

    Physicists have created a quantum gas microscope that can be used to observe single atoms at temperatures so low the particles follow the rules of quantum mechanics, behaving in bizarre ways.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Light and matter united

    Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles…

    5 minutes