Somaya Madkhaly of the University of Nottingham, UK, and her colleagues are on a mission to build compact equipment for quantum technologies. Ideally, such devices will be small, lightweight, and robust so that they could be used anywhere, anytime—unlike current lab-based systems, which are far from being portable. The team recently demonstrated a 3D-printed vacuum chamber that is 70% lighter than a standard vacuum chamber, something that they say could help reduce the size and weight of systems that use such chambers. Now they have used 3D-printed parts to demonstrate a compact magneto-optical trap—the starting point for many quantum technologies as well as cold-atom experiments [1].
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