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New Zealand Scientists Make Atom-Trapping Breakthrough
Mogster writes with this news from New Zealand: "'University of Otago scientists have made a 'major physics breakthrough' with the development of a technique to consistently isolate and capture a fast-moving single atom. A team of four researchers from the university's physics department are believed to be the first to isolate and photograph the Rubidium 85 atom.' Good to see Kiwis following in Rutherford's footsteps."
I'll believe it when I can see it (or determine its velocity).
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Because I couldn't see it..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
On an actually related note, was I the only one who eagerly viewed the story with the supposed photograph [of] the Rubidium 85 atom and felt very cheated that the article didn't contain the photograph of the atom?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
What is important about this experiment is how often they can trap a single atom. Previous experiments have shown that creating a small trap volume and using atomic collisions allows for a 50% probability. (This is the regime our experiment is currently trying to work in) Their work showed that it is possible to exceed this using fairly simple techniques. There are also more complicated theoretical methods which various groups are trying to demonstrate as well. I believe they have reported >80% probability of loading a single atom into their trap. This increased probability is not completely necessary for scaling atomic quantum computers but will help. If they can achieve a probability close to 1 then this would help greatly. For instance with the old well established techniques I would make an array of 100 trapping sites but only expect to have 50 usable qubits loaded during any one experiment. This would now give us the ability to say we have more than 80 usable qubits for every experiment, which just helps scaling the quantum computer to useful sizes easier.
I would be quite surprised if this was the first time that single Rb 85 atoms had been trapped and imaged. We have been using single Rb 87 atoms in our experiments since about 2005 and other groups had been doing it before us. Switching to Rb 85 would take us about 15 minutes as the only required change is a frequency change of ~2 GHz for our two cooling lasers.
Not the only one at all. I wanted to see a photograph of an atom.
The good news is I went and found it, the bad news is it's probably not as cool as I'd hoped: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/ED1009/S00122/university-of-otago-atom-breakthrough-represents.htm
You can just lure the atoms into a t rap with a trail of candy.
Monstar L
Photographs of trapped single atoms abound; they're just not that interesting. The atom will scatter light from the trapping beams and the scattered light can be easily imaged onto a camera. In fact, imaging is often used to characterize the trap. The atom just shows up as a blurry dot with the size of the blur being determined by the diffraction limit of the light or perhaps the tightness of the confinement. There's certainly no internal structure that would be resolvable.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
As another Otago researcher I attended a presentation by the lead researcher a couple of weeks ago. Although the science was cool his presentation style really sold the show and it’s a shame you can’t see him in action. What made me laugh was that he seemed most proud that he had proved his elementary school teacher was wrong. A fact that is also repeated in the article linked above.