But to prepare the laser light so that it has the properties to cool atoms typically requires an optical assembly as big as a dining-room table. That's a problem because it limits the use of these ...

Scientists also use lasers to cool atoms, nearly to absolute zero. Over time, a laser can take almost all the energy out of an atom. And it does this in the most contrary way possible: forcing energy ...

Lasers? Individual atoms trapped next to hot surfaces? Lots of dense text about degrees of freedom and stuff? I have found the after life, and it is a big quantum optics experiment. Researchers have ...

Physicists have invented a new technique to cool atoms into condensates, which is faster than the conventional method and conserves a large fraction of the original atoms. The team used a new process ...

Researchers have found a way to get around the initial limitations of laser cooling, to cool atoms into Bose Einstein condensates using laser light from start to finish — a much faster, ...

How can light be used to cool atoms and molecules? How can light be used to cool atoms and molecules? Lasers are known to burn things, fix eyes, and dance on powerpoint presentations. But they can ...

It's cool to be small. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have miniaturized the optical components required to cool atoms down to a few thousandths of a degree ...

Cool dudes: Wesley Campbell, Xueping Long and Andrew Jayich. (Courtesy: Reed Hutchison/UCLA) A new way of trapping and cooling atoms has been unveiled by a team of physicists at the University of ...

Atoms are best studied when slowed down and to slow them, atoms must be cooled. As such, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made tiny optical components that ...

Chemical reactions drive the mechanisms of life as well as a million other natural processes on earth. These reactions occur at a wide spectrum of temperatures, from those prevailing at the chilly ...

Conventional laser cooling of atoms relies on photons exciting the electrons inside the atom. When the electron falls back into the ground state, the atom spontaneously emits a photon. Since this ...

Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell of JILA, an interdisciplinary research centre in Boulder, Colorado, have won this year's Nobel ...