{"id":8376,"date":"2013-08-19T09:18:10","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T13:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=8376"},"modified":"2013-08-19T09:18:10","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T13:18:10","slug":"know-your-laser-cooled-atoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/08\/19\/know-your-laser-cooled-atoms\/","title":{"rendered":"Know Your Laser-Cooled Atoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the tail end<\/a> of the cold-atom toolbox<\/a> series, I joked about doing a “trading card” version shortening the posts to a more web-friendly length. In idly thinking about this, though, it occurred to me that if one were going to have cold-atom trading cards, it might make more sense to have them for the atoms, rather than the techniques. And having just devoted many thousands of words to technique, I don’t really feel like trying to cut those down more, but atoms<\/em>…<\/p>\n

The “featured image” up top is a slide from my laser cooling lectures for our first-year seminar class. Elements outlined in red have been laser cooled; the highlight colors within the boxes indicate different groups of atoms that are interesting for some common reason. I show this in class both to brag about the number of atomic species that the techniques I talk about can be applied to, and also to remind students of the vast swathes of the Periodic Table that are, as yet, unexplored in the ultracold regime.<\/p>\n

I last gave this set of lectures in 2011, so the slide’s a bit out of date– in particular, dysprosium has not only been laser cooled, but Bose condensed since I last updated this. And even the out-of-date version has more atoms than I’d have the patience to write up individually. But we’ll give this a go for a little while, at least, which should be enough to cover the really important atomic species from the history of laser cooling. Which ought to be enough to make a point of some sort.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to do these all at once (though there will probably be a few in a row in the next couple of days, to get the ball rolling), but I hope they’ll provide a source of quick-and-easy blog posts for the next little while that will hopefully be at least somewhat interesting to read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the tail end of the cold-atom toolbox series, I joked about doing a “trading card” version shortening the posts to a more web-friendly length. In idly thinking about this, though, it occurred to me that if one were going to have cold-atom trading cards, it might make more sense to have them for the… Continue reading Know Your Laser-Cooled Atoms<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146,675,676,19,169,238,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atoms_and_molecules","category-cold-atom-tools","category-cold-atoms-physics","category-experiment","category-lasers","category-optics","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8376","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=8376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}