This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it’s not the last xenon paper I’m an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process. My favorite story about this stuff was… Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
Category: Physics
The Greatest Physicists
Over at Built om Facts, Matt is working toward a Tope Ten list of physicists. He says the top three are obvious, but he’s soliciting nominations for the rest. Back in the early days of this blog, I ran a poll for the greatest experiment in physics, and there are worse places to start. Newton… Continue reading The Greatest Physicists
Babies Are Quantized
As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source. This shows up in the famous… Continue reading Babies Are Quantized
Adopt a Physicist
No, not me. Not literally, anyway– I’m quite happy with my current family. Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called
A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I’m going to split the making-of… Continue reading A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions
This paper is the third of the articles I wrote when I was a grad student, and the first one where I was the lead author. It’s also probably my favorite of the lot, not just because of the role it played in my career, but because it packs a lot of science into four… Continue reading Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions
Congratulations to Dave Wineland
NIST’s Dave Wineland has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Wineland is one of the most impressive figures in modern AMO physics, with a long list of accomplishments. As the NIST release explains: Wineland is internationally recognized for developing the technique of using lasers to cool ions (electrically charged atoms or molecules) to near… Continue reading Congratulations to Dave Wineland
Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller
Every time I mention the idea of teaching physics to a wider audience than just physics majors, somebody brings up Richard Muller’s course, “Physics for Future Presidents,” at Berkeley. So, I was pleased to find out that he has turned the course into a book, also titled Physics for Future Presidents, with the subtitle “The… Continue reading Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller
Scooped; or, The Making of “Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices”
The experiment described in the previous post was published in early 1998, but the work was done in 1997. This was the year when things really turned around for me in grad school– the optical control paper was done in the summer 0f ’94, and ’95 and ’96 were just a carnival of pain. Everything… Continue reading Scooped; or, The Making of “Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices”
Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices
I announced my intention to do some research blogging a little while ago, and managed one pair of posts before the arrival of SteelyKid kind of distracted me. I’m still planning to complete the Metastable Xenon Project blog, though (despite the utter lack of response to the first two), and the second real paper I… Continue reading Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices