A research team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland has succeeded in cooling atoms of a rare-earth element, erbium, to within two millionths ...

Pushing experimental boundaries: Aluminum fluoride (AlF) is the first stable “closed shell” molecule ever prepared in a magneto-optical trap and cooled to millikelvin temperatures. The AlF molecular ...

Slow motion: artistic illustration showing snippets of motion of an antihydrogen atom in the ALPHA magnetic trap, before and after laser cooling. The grey tracks are before cooling and the blue tracks ...

Laser cooling, in which carefully arranged laser beams can reduce the momentum of an atom to the point where the it can be individually caught by a magnetic field, is an important technology for ...

Physicists at the California Institute of Technology have built a laser with a single atom by trapping a cold caesium atom in an optical cavity. The laser produces nonclassical light that could be ...

A laser system for ultra-cold-atom research is part of a new scientific payload currently making its way to the International Space Station, and due to arrive May 24. Launched from NASA’s Wallops ...

State-of-the-art techniques make it possible to build a spin-chain quantum simulator based on laser-trapped circular Rydberg atoms. This simulator combines the flexibility of atomic lattices and the ...

The advent of laser cooling revolutionized the field of atomic physics, transforming atomic clocks and GPS technology and laying the foundations for quantum computing with atoms and ions. In the first ...

Antimatter is a tricky substance to study, not least because it will annihilate any container you try to put it in. But now, physicists at CERN have developed a new antimatter trap that can cool down ...

In context: Antimatter on the atomic scale is identical to normal matter. The difference is that it has an opposite charge. Therefore when the two meet, they annihilate each other. It is difficult to ...