The Adventure of Cold Atoms. From Optical Pumping to Quantum Gases
Conservation laws are very important in quantum physics. Two examples of applications will be given. First, optical pumping which uses transfer of angular momentum from polarized photons to atoms to produce highly polarized atomic gases. Then, laser ....
More details | Watch nowA New Kilogram in 2018: The Biggest Revolution in Metrology Since the French Revolution
Metrology - the science of measurements - is responsible for the international uniformity and precision in standards. Today, the seven units for meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela of our international system of units (SI units....
More details | Watch nowWhat About Redefining Time Using a Stable Laser?
Several laser-based Atomic Clocks now have an accuracy potential of ~2 x10-18, a hundred-fold better than the best achieved after more than 60 years' experience with rf resonances in Cs atoms. Still, this long attention span documents that the Cs Fou....
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Elementary Particle Physics seeks to discover the basic constituents of matter and understand the fundamental forces that act on them. In this lecture I shall review the current state of particle physics, the grand success of the ñstandard modelî, ....
More details | Watch nowDiscovery of the Higgs Particle
Recently the Higgs particle has been discovered at CERN. This particle was theoretically predicted. The historical development of field theory, leading to this prediction will be discussed.
More details | Watch nowFuture Accelerators for Astro-Particle Physics
One of the most remarkable results of astro-particle Physics has been the success of the Standard Model, recently culminated in the discovery of the Higgs particle (Ho). However, the Ho is observable only in few channels at the LHC, in the presence o....
More details | Watch nowThe International Year of Light: Celebrating Fifty Years of Laser Revolution in Physics
The year 2015 has been named the International Year of Light, to mark milestones in the science of light which occurred 1000, 200, 150, 100 and 50 years go. I was a young student in physics in 1965, when the cosmic radiation background was discovered....
More details | Watch nowLight Quanta and Their Idiosyncrasies
Maxwell's electromagnetic theory (now 150 years old) seemed in its comprehensive way to be capable of answering all of the questions one might ever pose about the theory of light. But that spell was broken in 1900 by Planck's discovery that light bea....
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Two of the great scientific and technical revolutions of the 20th century were the discovery of the quantum nature of the submicroscopic world, and the advent of information science and engineering. Both of these have had a profound effect not only o....
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The spectrum of a frequency comb, commonly generated by a mode-locked femtosecond laser, consists of several hundred thousand precisely evenly spaced spectral lines. Such laser frequency combs have revolutionized the art of measuring the frequency of....
More details | Watch nowThe Origin of Elementary Particle Masses
In the beginning of the 60s, the laws of classical general relativity, Einstein's generalisation of Newtonian gravity, and of quantum electrodynamics, the quantum version of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, were known. These laws describe long range....
More details | Watch nowOptical Microscopy – the Resolution Revolution
Throughout the 20th century it was widely accepted that a light microscope relying on conventional optical lenses cannot discern details that are much finer than about half the wavelength of light (200-400 nm), due to diffraction. However, in the 199....
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