Research Highlights
Winter 2009
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The Lab with the X-ray Eyes
Kapteyn/Murnane group have decided to use soft X-ray bursts to watch the interplay of electronic and atomic motions inside a molecule. Such information determines how chemical bonds are formed or broken during chemical reactions... Read More »
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The Right Stuff
It took them a matter of a couple of weeks to come up with a basic theoretical framework for a quantum computer based on alkaline-earth metals such as Sr... Read More »
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Fortune’s Bubbles Rise and Fall
Scott Papp, graduate student Juan Pino, and Fellow Carl Wieman decided to see what would happen as they changed the magnetic field around a mixture of two different rubidium (Rb) isotopes during Bose-Einstein condensation.... Read More »
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Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
An oxygen molecule (O2) doesn’t fall apart so easily — even when an X-ray knocks out one of its electrons and superexcites the molecule during a process called photoionization. In this process, the X-ray first removes an electron from deep inside the molecule, leaving a hole in O2+... Read More »
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Threads of Stars and Shadow
Gayler Harford, Fellow Andrew Hamilton, and Nickolay Gnedin of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics decided to investigate the structures formed by ordinary matter (baryons) and dark matter soon after the reionization process was complete... Read More »
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Beams In Collision
Brian Sawyer, Ben Stuhl, and Mark Yeo, research associate Dajun Wang, and Fellow Jun Ye fired cold hydroxyl (OH) radicals into a linear decelerator equipped with an array of highly charged electrodes and slowed the OH molecules to standstill... Read More »
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Explosive Evidence
It turns out that researchers have already figured out some nifty techniques involving lasers and jets of reactive atoms for doing just that in a gaseous environment.They recently probed the molecules that form when the surface of a liquid is bombarded with a very reactive gas... Read More »
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Spare Time
The nation’s backup time scale, consisting of four atomic clocks, two measurement systems, and supporting hardware is tucked away inside radio station WWV’s remote transmission station, located 12 miles northwest of Fort Collins... Read More »
