The machines in physics professor Peter Engels’ laboratory are custom-manufactured to take precise measurements and withstand extreme temperatures. Every component is one-of-a-kind, expensive and time-consuming to construct. » More …
Researchers at Washington State University have used a super-cold cloud of atoms that behaves like a single atom to see a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago and witnessed only once since.
The phenomenon takes place in the seemingly otherworldly realm of quantum physics and opens a new experimental path to potentially powerful quantum computing.
Working out of a lab in WSU’s Webster Hall, physicist Peter Engels and his colleagues cooled about one million atoms of rubidium to 100 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. There was no colder place in the universe, said Engels, unless someone was doing a similar experiment elsewhere on Earth or on another planet.