Category: ResearchBlogging

Treating Photons Like Atoms: “Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity”

This paper made a big splash back in November, with lots of news stories talking about it; it even made the #6 spot on Physics World‘s list of breakthroughs of the year. I didn’t write it up then because I was hellishly busy, and couldn’t take time away from working on the book-in-progress to figure… Continue reading Treating Photons Like Atoms: “Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity”

Bouncing Neutrons for Fun and Science: “Realization of a gravity-resonance-spectroscopy technique”

Several people blogged about a new measurement of gravitational states of neutrons done by physicists using ultracold neutrons from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France. I had to resort to Twitter to get access to the paper (we don’t get Nature Physics here, and it’s way faster than Inter-Library Loan), but this is a nice topic… Continue reading Bouncing Neutrons for Fun and Science: “Realization of a gravity-resonance-spectroscopy technique”

Wave Nature Gets Bigger: “Quantum interference of large organic molecules”

It’s been a while since I wrote up a ResearchBlogging post, but since a recent paper forced me to update my “What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics” slides with new pictures, I thought I should highlight the work on the blog as well. Not that you could’ve missed it, if you follow physics-y… Continue reading Wave Nature Gets Bigger: “Quantum interference of large organic molecules”

Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment

Earlier this week, I talked about the technical requirements for taking a picture of an interference pattern from two independent lasers, and mentioned in passing that a 1967 experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel had already shown the interference effect. Their experiment was clever enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, though, so here we go:… Continue reading Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment

Indirect Excitation Control: Ultrafast Quantum Gates for Single Atomic Qubits

Last week, John Baez posted a report on a seminar by Dzimitry Matsukevich on ion trap quantum information issues. In the middle of this, he writes: Once our molecular ions are cold, how can we get them into specific desired states? Use a mode locked pulsed laser to drive stimulated Raman transitions. Huh? As far… Continue reading Indirect Excitation Control: Ultrafast Quantum Gates for Single Atomic Qubits

Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing

There’s a minor scandal in fundamental physics that doesn’t get talked about much, and it has to do with the very first fundamental force discovered, gravity. The scandal is the value of Newton’s gravitational constant G, which is the least well known of the fundamental constants, with a value of 6.674 28(67) x 10-11 m3… Continue reading Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing

Melting Simulated Insulators

The Joerg Heber post that provided one of the two papers for yesterday’s Hanbury Brown Twiss-travaganza also included a write-up of a new paper in Nature on Mott insulators, which was also written up in Physics World. Most of the experimental details are quite similar to a paper by Markus Greiner’s group I wrote up… Continue reading Melting Simulated Insulators