"Scientists have devised a new technique for real-time detection of freely moving individual neutral atoms that is more than 99.7% accurate and sensitive enough to discern the arrival of a single atom in less than one-millionth of a second, about 20 times faster than the best previous methods. The system, described in Advance Online Publication at the Nature Physics web site by researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) in College Park, MD, and the Universidad de Concepción in Chile, employs a novel means of altering the polarization of laser light trapped between two highly-reflective mirrors, in effect letting the scientists "see" atoms passing through by the individual photons that they scatter."
