Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I’ll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics at a small college, kind […]
Category: Lasers
Bunches and Antibunches of Atoms: Hanbury Brown and Twiss Effects in Ultracold Atoms
Two papers in one post this time out. One of these was brought to my attention by Joerg Heber, the other I was reminded of when checking some information for last week’s mathematical post on photons. They fit extremely well together though, and both relate to the photon correlation stuff I was talking about last […]
Quantum Optics from the Opposite Direction: QED Limits on Laser Intensities
Most of the time, when we talk about seeing quantum effects from light, we talk about extremely weak beams– looking at intensities where one photon more or less represents a significant change in the intensity of the light. Last week, though, Physics Buzz wrote up a paper that goes in the other direction: they suggest […]
Do Not Look In Laser Pointer With Remaining Eye
Some folks I used to work with at NIST have looked at cheap green laser pointers, and found a potential danger. Some of the dimmer-looking green lasers are not so dim in the infrared, and in one case emitted 10X the rated power in invisible light. This could be a potential eye hazard. You can […]
What Do You Need to Make Cold Atoms? Part 2: Lasers and Optics
Following on yesterday’s discussion of the vacuum hardware needed for cooling atoms, let’s talk about the other main component of the apparatus: the optical system. The primary technique used for making cold atoms is laser cooling, and I’m sure it will come as no surprise that this requires lasers, and where there are lasers, there […]
Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought
The big physics story at the moment is probably the new measurement of the size of the proton, which is reported in this Nature paper (which does not seem to be on the arxiv, alas). This is kind of a hybrid of nuclear and atomic physics, as it’s a spectroscopic measurement of a quasi-atom involving […]
Watching Individual Atoms Make a Phase Transition
A press release from Harvard caught my eye last week, announcing results from Markus Greiner’s group that were, according to the release, published in Science. The press release seems to have gotten the date wrong, though– the article didn’t appear in Science last week. It is, however, available on the arxiv, so you get the […]
Dropping Bose Condensates for Fun and Science
An experiment in Germany has generated a good deal of publicity by dropping their Bose-Einstein Cendensate (BEC) apparatus from a 146 meter tower. This wasn’t an act of frustration by an enraged graduate student (anybody who has worked with BEC has probably fantasized about throwing at least part of their apparatus down a deep hole), […]
Table-Top X-Ray Lasers
I mentioned in a previous post that one of the cool talks I saw at DAMOP had to do with generation of coherent X-Ray beams using ultra-fast lasers. What’s particualrly cool about this work is that it doesn’t require gigantic accelerators or nuclear explosions to produce a laser-like beam of x-rays– it’s all done with […]
Relativity on a Human Scale
While I mostly restricted myself to watching invited talks at DAMOP last week, I did check out a few ten-minute talks, one of which ended up being just about the coolest thing I saw at the meeting. Specifically, the Friday afternoon talk on observing relativity with atomic clocks by Chin-Wen Chou of the Time and […]