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It took Eric Cornell three years to build JILA’s first Top Trap with his own two hands in the lab. The innovative trap relied primarily on magnetic fields and gravity to trap ultracold atoms. In 1995, Cornell and his colleagues used the Top Trap to make the world’s first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), an achievement that earned Cornell and Carl Wieman the Nobel Prize in 2001.

Compact and transportable optical lattices are coming soon to a laboratory near you, thanks to the Anderson group and its spin-off company, ColdQuanta. A new robust on-chip lattice system (which measures 2.3 cm on a side) is now commercially

Compact and transportable optical lattices are coming soon to a laboratory near you, thanks to the Anderson group and its spin-off company, ColdQuanta. A new robust on-chip lattice system (which measures 2.3 cm on a side) is now commercially available. The chip comes with a miniature vacuum system, lasers, and mounting platform.

The photoelectric effect has been well known since the publication of Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper explaining that quantized particles of light can stimulate the emission of electrons from materials. The nature of this quantum mechanical effect is closely related to the question how much time it might take for an electron to leave a material such as a helium atom.

Fellow Dana Anderson has won a CO-LABS 2014 Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research in Foundational Technology. Anderson’s work in the commercialization of cold-atom technology also received an Honorable Mention for the development of a strong public/private partnership.

The spooky quantum property of entanglement is set to become a powerful tool in precision measurement, thanks to researchers in the Thompson group. Entanglement means that the quantum states of something physical—two atoms, two hundred atoms, or two million atoms—interact and retain a connection, even over long distances.

Graduate student Adam Kaufman and his colleagues in the Regal and Rey groups have demonstrated a key first step in assembling quantum matter one atom at a time. Kaufman accomplished this feat by laser-cooling two atoms of rubidium (87Rb) trapped in separate laser beam traps called optical tweezers. Then, while maintaining complete control over the atoms to be sure they were identical in every way, he moved the optical tweezers closer and closer until they were about 600 nm apart. At this distance, the trapped atoms were close enough to “tunnel” their way over to the other laser beam trap if they were so inclined.

Research associate Tom Purdy and his colleagues in the Regal group have just built an even better miniature light-powered machine that can now strip away noise from a laser beam. Their secret: a creative workaround of a quantum limit imposed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This limit makes it impossible to simultaneously reduce the noise on both the amplitude and phase of light inside interferometers and other high-tech instruments that detect miniscule position changes.

The Regal group recently completed a nifty feat that had never been done before: The researchers grabbed onto a single trapped rubidium atom (87Rb) and placed it in its quantum ground state. This experiment has identified an important source of cold atoms that can be arbitrarily manipulated for investigations of quantum simulations and quantum logic gates in future high-speed computers.

The Dana Z. Anderson group has developed a microchip-based system that not only rapidly produces Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), but also is compact and transportable. The complete working system easily fits on an average-sized rolling cart. This technology opens the door to using ultracold matter in gravity sensors, atomic clocks, inertial sensors, as well as in electric- and magnetic-field sensing. Research associate Dan Farkas demonstrated the new system at the American Physical Society’s March 2010 meeting, held in Portland, Oregon, March 15–19.