An Atom-Sorting Machine

by Yevhen Miroshnychenko et al. Nature, 13 Jul 2006 Laser cooling and trapping techniques allow us to control and manipulate neutral atoms. Here we rearrange, with submicrometre precision, the positions and ordering of laser-trapped atoms within strings by manipulating individual atoms with optical tweezers. Strings of equidistant atoms created in this way could serve as a scalable memory for quantum information. Read more