- Why couldn't holography be practically demonstrated with visible light until the invention of the laser in 1960?
Quantum Optics
Light-matter interaction at the single-photon and coherent-state level.
- Why did holography have to wait more than a decade after Gabor's 1947 idea before it could actually work?
- How did splitting an atomic beam into two separated pulses make Ramsey's frequency measurements so much sharper?
- What lets an electromagnetic trap like the Penning trap hold a single charged particle suspended for days at a time?
- What did it mean for Dehmelt to photograph a single barium ion with the naked eye?
- How does 'optical molasses' actually slow down a fast-moving atom?
- How did Steven Chu's six-beam arrangement manage to trap atoms in three dimensions?
- What modern technologies depend on the existence of Bose-Einstein condensates?
- How does electromagnetically induced transparency allow a pulse of light to be stopped completely inside a medium?
- What happens to the information carried by a light pulse when the control laser is switched off?
- How much had Lene Hau already slowed light down before the 2001 experiments stopped it entirely?
- What distinguishes coherent laser light from the chaotic light of a candle, according to Glauber's theory?
- How did Haroche keep a single photon bouncing inside a microwave cavity for a tenth of a second?
- How did Wineland use trapped ions and laser pulses to build the first quantum logic gates?
- What modern technologies depend on the quantum measurement techniques Haroche and Wineland developed?