{"id":3028,"date":"2008-10-09T11:47:50","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T11:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/09\/whats-interesting-about-amo-ph\/"},"modified":"2008-10-09T11:47:50","modified_gmt":"2008-10-09T11:47:50","slug":"whats-interesting-about-amo-ph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/09\/whats-interesting-about-amo-ph\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s Interesting About AMO Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the spirit of the previous post, I thought I would provide a short list of the reasons why I am happy to be a physicist in the area of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics. Like nearly anyone who hung on long enough to get a Ph.D. in some field, I think the area I work in is the coolest thing ever, and here are some of the reasons why:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AMO Physics is cool because it&#8217;s the best field for exploring quantum effects. Pick up a book that deals with fundamental quantum issues&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Quantum-Challenge-Second-Foundations-Mechanics\/dp\/076372470X\"><cite>The Quantum Challenge<\/cite><\/a>, say, and look at the experimental demonstrations. Almost all of them come from AMO physics. AMO offers the cleanest demonstrations of all the weird stuff that quantum theory predicts&#8211; BEC, non-locality, superposition states, quantum information&#8211; and that&#8217;s every bit as cool as the Higgs boson.<\/li>\n<li>AMO Physics is cool because it&#8217;s concrete. At the end of the day, it always comes back to real, physical objects doing real, physical things. There is an atom, or a molecule, or a photon, and you can say exactly what it&#8217;s doing. Some of the things that atoms and photons do end up being pretty weird, but at the end of the day, you can always bring it back to the concrete behavior of atoms, molecules, and photons.<\/li>\n<li>Experimental AMO Physics is cool because it&#8217;s done on a human scale. Even the biggest AMO labs&#8211; my old group at NIST, the Ketterle lab at MIT, the Cornell group at JILA&#8211; even those labs are based around experiments that fit in a single room (give or take). You don&#8217;t need thousand-member collaborations, or billion-dollar user facilities&#8211; one person, or a small number of people, can operate an AMO apparatus. Experiments are done on their own schedule, and don&#8217;t need to wait on other people.<\/li>\n<li>AMO Physics has practical applications. Atomic clocks are the best example, forming the basis for the GPS navigation system, and providing essential tools for everything from astronomy to power distribution. There are lots of other AMO-based technologies in use, though. Modern telecommunications is heavily dependent on lasers and optics. Atom-based and optical sensors are in the works for lots of things. Even esoteric things like quantum information have some practical applications, with commercial quantum cryptography systems now available.<\/li>\n<li>AMO Physics provides technologies that enable amazing discoveries in lots of other fields. AMO-based experiments at low energy&#8211; parity non-conservation tests, EDM searches, spectroscopic tests of physical constants, g-2 measurements&#8211; put limits on physics beyond the Standard Model that are competitive with if not better than accelerator-based measurements. Femtosecond X-ray lasers allow studies of the dynamics of chemistry on the single-molecule scale. AMO-based methods of manipulating particles allow groundbreaking studies of biophysics. Precision measurement techniques based in AMO Physics (chiefly laser spectroscopy) have the potential to revolutionize a number of fields.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, that&#8217;s (part of) why I&#8217;m happy to do what I do. What makes you happy to be in your field?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><i>(We&#8217;re currently in the middle of a fundraising drive for DonorsChoose. My goal for the challenge amounts to about $3 per daily page view on the blog. If you feel that you have gotten $3 worth of entertainment or information from this post, please consider visiting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.donorschoose.org\/donors\/viewChallenge.html?id=19006\">my challenge entry<\/a> and making a donation.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the spirit of the previous post, I thought I would provide a short list of the reasons why I am happy to be a physicist in the area of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics. Like nearly anyone who hung on long enough to get a Ph.D. in some field, I think the area&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/09\/whats-interesting-about-amo-ph\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What&#8217;s Interesting About AMO Physics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}