Are the Individual Clouds of Atoms Like Solid Ora?

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In things that i'm currently doing in my lab, we work with little clouds of atoms, each one pinned in a focus lazer beam. They're sort of foca at micron scale, distances apart, right? Whereas te the size of the atom is on the anxrom scale. And are they like sitting in a bowl or something, what prevents them from just falling to the floor? Ye, so much of what we do involves using lazers. But also then we hold them in place. We essentially kind of are levitating them.

When it comes to thinking about quantum mechanics, there are levels. One level is shut-up-and-calculate: find a wave function, square it to get a probability. One level is foundational: dig deeply into the underlying ontology. But there’s a level in between, long neglected but recently coming to life. In this level you think about — or do experiments with — entangled quantum systems in the real world, putting entanglement to use. Monika Schleier-Smith is an experimental physicist specializing in cold atoms, which can be both entangled and manipulated. We discuss how to use such systems to study everything from metrology to quantum gravity.

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Monika Schleier-Smith received her Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently an Associate Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and the I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics from the American Physical Society.

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