Atom chips—devices that use electric or magnetic fields to confine and manipulate atoms—have traditionally employed metallic conductors, such as copper wires, to connect up the circuits that create the fields. Today, however, there exist more sophisticated conductors, which have been used in other devices to achieve improved performance. Mark Fromhold of the University of Nottingham, UK, and his colleagues have now predicted what it would mean if one of those conductors—in this case graphene—were to replace the metal in atom chips [1]. The team finds that the graphene-based atom chips should be able to trap atoms for more than 10 s, a period orders of magnitude longer than is possible with metal-based atom chips.
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