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Low-temperature physics

Low-temperature physics

Colder: how physicists beat the theoretical limit for laser cooling and laid the foundations for a quantum revolution

05 Sep 2023

It’s practically a law that no experiment ever works better than theory says it should, but that’s exactly what happened in atomic physics in the late 1980s, as Chad Orzel describes in the second instalment of his three-part history of laser cooling. The first part can be read here 

the atom trap apparatus
Glowing brightly In a photo taken in the late-1980s, researcher Kris Helmerson observes a tiny glowing cloud of sodium atoms caught by six intersecting laser beams in a vacuum chamber. At that time, Helmerson was a member of Bill Phillips' research group at what was then the US National Bureau of Standards. Phillips went on to share the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for laser cooling and trapping techniques developed in this lab. (Courtesy: H Mark Helfer/NIST)
In the late 1960s a small community of researchers began using forces from light to push small objec

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Chad Orzel is a popular-science author and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in the US.  He has a PhD in chemical physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he studied laser cooling at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the lab of Bill Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics
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