{"id":216707,"date":"2025-06-27T06:23:49","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T11:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/researcher-discusses-trapping-single-atoms-and-putting-them-to-work-in-emerging-quantum-technologies"},"modified":"2025-06-27T06:23:49","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T11:23:49","slug":"researcher-discusses-trapping-single-atoms-and-putting-them-to-work-in-emerging-quantum-technologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/researcher-discusses-trapping-single-atoms-and-putting-them-to-work-in-emerging-quantum-technologies","title":{"rendered":"Researcher discusses trapping single atoms and putting them to work in emerging quantum technologies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researcher-discusses-trapping-single-atoms-and-putting-them-to-work-in-emerging-quantum-technologies.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Blink and you might miss it, but if you keep your eye on the monitors in professor Sebastian Will\u2019s lab, you\u2019ll catch a series of single-second flashes that light up the screen. Each flash is an atom of strontium, a naturally occurring alkaline-earth metal, being briefly captured and held in place by \u201ctweezers\u201d made of laser light. \u201cWe can see single atoms,\u201d says graduate student Aaron Holman. \u201cSeeing those never gets old.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The lab saw its first atom at the end of 2022, after two years of constructing the experimental setup\u2014a complicated and carefully calibrated series of atomic sources, vacuum chambers, magnets, electronics, and lasers that trap <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/individual+atoms\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">individual atoms<\/a> and place them into custom arrangements\u2014from scratch.<\/p>\n<p>Holman, currently a 5th-year Ph.D. student in Physics, helped build the \u201cTweeSr\u201d project, as it\u2019s referred to in the lab, from the ground up. A pure atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physicist at heart, he\u2019s now working on ways to turn fundamental research on how atoms, molecules, and light interact into new technologies with collaborators at Columbia Engineering. He\u2019s also heading toward bigger scales as part of a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/quantum+network\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">quantum network<\/a> that is currently under construction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blink and you might miss it, but if you keep your eye on the monitors in professor Sebastian Will\u2019s lab, you\u2019ll catch a series of single-second flashes that light up the screen. Each flash is an atom of strontium, a naturally occurring alkaline-earth metal, being briefly captured and held in place by \u201ctweezers\u201d made of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}