atomic cooling

6 posts

When cooling down really means slowing down

5 min read
Scicomm Albert Einstein atomic cooling atomic trap Bose-Einstein condensate Bose-Einstein statistics Carl Wieman Claude Cohen-Tannoudji collisional cooling diatomic molecules Eric Cornell Harvard University laser cooling Massachusetts Institute of Technoogy NaLi niobium nitride quantum chemistry quantum computing S Pancharatnam Satyendra Nath Bose Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam Sisyphus cooling spin polarization superconductors superfluids University of Waterloo Wolfgang Ketterle

Consider this post the latest in a loosely defined series about atomic cooling techniques that I've been writing since June 2018. Atoms can't run a temperature, but things made up of atoms, l…

The imperfection of strontium titanate

5 min read
Scicomm atomic cooling atomic lattice centrosymmetry gem fire inversion center perovskite piezoelectricity polar metals polarization pyroelectrocity second-order phase transition strontium titanate superconductivity surface tension tausonite thermal equilibrium thermalization

When you squeeze some crystals, you distort their lattice of atoms just enough to separate a pair of charged particles and that in turn gives rise to a voltage. Such materials are called piezoelectric…

The trouble with laser-cooling anions

2 min read
Scicomm adiabatic cooling anions atomic cooling cerium diatomic carbon Doppler cooling electron affinity hyperfine structure ion trap laser cooling laser-assisted evaporative cooling microkelvin nuclear spin Sisyphus cooling Sivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam sympathetic cooling

For scientists to use lasers to cool an atom, the atom needs to have two energy states. When laser light is shined on an atom moving towards the source of light, one of its electrons absorbs a photon,…