When I move, you move. By pairing the vibrations of a charged molecule and a charged atom, researchers have figured out how to observe and control the more complex molecule with unprecedented scope.
In recent years, physicists have made huge strides in controlling individual atoms, often using a method called laser cooling. This involves a particle absorbing laser light and then re-emitting it, slowing and cooling down in the process.
This process works remarkably well for atoms, cooling them to within trillionths of a degree of absolute zero. The colder an atom is and the less energy it has, the more precisely researchers know its state. This makes cold atoms extraordinarily useful as sensors to measure tiny changes in force and acceleration, probing details of fundamental physics.
But it’s much more difficult to control molecules, simply because they are more complicated. Molecules have many more possible energy levels and orientations than atoms, and making a measurement can easily force a molecule into a different state.
“We would like to open for molecules what laser cooling has opened for atoms,” says Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.
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