Lasers
Category archives for Lasers
Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 9, 2010 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
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 22, 2010 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
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 21, 2010 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
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 2, 2010 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
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 1, 2010 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…
Anatomy of a Conference: DAMOP Day 2– The Rise of Precision Measurement
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 27, 2010 Since I sort of implied a series in the previous post, and I have no better ideas, here’s a look at Thursday’s DAMOP program:
Anatomy of a Conference: DAMOP Day 1
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 26, 2010 The conference I’m at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or “DAMPΦ.” The Greek letter is a recent addition– as recently as…
The Past and Future of the Laser
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 8, 2010 While it’s not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture: Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts– Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST, Steven Block of…
The Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time Is…
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 3, 2010 Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of lasers). The…
Last Call for Laser Smackdown Voting
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 2, 2010 With over 700 votes cast in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, laser cooling has opened a commanding 20-vote lead in the race to be the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time. If you prefer one of the other options, you have only six hours left to…
