Researched
Cold Atoms: BEC & Laser Cooling
Laser cooling (Nobel 1997) chilled atoms to microkelvin; in 1995 JILA made the first Bose-Einstein condensate, 2,000 rubidium atoms below 170 nK (Nobel 2001).
Open in the interactive tree →Cornell, Wieman and colleagues combined laser cooling with magnetic evaporative cooling; about four months later Ketterle's MIT group made a sodium condensate. Laser-cooled atoms now run caesium fountain clocks, with an uncertainty near 5 parts in 10^16, and are loaded into optical lattices to study quantum phase transitions.
Prerequisites
- Quantum Mechanics1925
- Laser1960
Unlocks
- Quantum Error Correction2024Trapped-ion and neutral-atom logical qubits start from laser-cooled atoms