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The advent of tunable laboratory lasers in the 1970s enabled atomic physicists
to begin exploring how to trap and cool ions and atoms with laser light. Since
that time, NIST researchers, most notably David J. Wineland, Eric A. Cornell,
and Nobel laureate William D. Phillips,
have contributed pivotal breakthroughs to this exciting new field. Among our
accomplishments are the first laser cooling of atoms, developing ion and atom
traps, breaking temperature barriers, and creating for the first time in the
world a Bose-Einstein condensate in an atomic gas, an exotic form of matter in
which most of the atoms have the lowest possible kinetic energy and merge into
a single quantum state. The latter was accomplished at JILA, a joint research
enterprise of NIST and the University of Colorado. Recently, NIST researchers
in Boulder have been using ion traps to explore the feasibility of quantum
computing.
The most immediate pay-off of this research is vastly improved knowledge about how atoms behave. This increased knowledge is now being applied to the next generation of atomic clocks to improve their accuracy. |
![[Three images showing formation of Bose-Einstein condensate]](Images/bose.jpg)
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Online: June 1999
![[Two trapped beryllium ions]](Images/2ions15d.jpg)