Seeing the small

University of Otago scientists have made a “major physics breakthrough”, developing a technique to capture the image of a single atom, the Rubidium 85. The process takes a matter of seconds, starting by dramatically slowing down a cloud of about 1, atoms in a vacuum chamber. A laser beam is then used to hold about 5 atoms. Finally, light from another laser at a particular frequency causes the atoms to repel each other, leaving a lone atom. Lead researcher Mikkel Andersen said individual atoms were consistently isolated, which meant “a major step” toward using the atoms to build ultra-fast quantum-logic computers capable of performing complex information-processing tasks. “What we have done moves the frontier of what scientists can do and gives us deterministic control of the smallest building blocks in our world,” Andersen said. The findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature Physics.