S Pancharatnam - Catabatic

A laser to make light of many shapes

Jul 17, 2025 4 min read

Lasers can produce a slender beam of light of just one wavelength. For this simple feature, they are everywhere in modern technology, from the internet to medical devices and even in entertainment as…

A fountainhead of intrigue

Nov 24, 2022 7 min read

Scicomm Barry Cipra Bernhard Riemann Brian Hayes Michael Berry nontrivial zeroes random Hermitian matrix Riemann hypothesis Riemann zeta function S Pancharatnam

Recently, a Chinese-American mathematician named Yitang Zhang claimed to have resolved the Landau-Siegel zeroes conjecture, which is related to the Riemann hypothesis. (Specifically, disproving the co…

When cooling down really means slowing down

May 5, 2020 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…