Atomoscience

Atomoscience is the field enabled by the development of general methods to control atomic motion in gas phase. Atomoscience is a "bottom up" approach to building complexity, and is complementary to Nanoscience, typically, a top-down approach. Mark G. Raizen

Mark G. Raizen

Mark George Raizen is a physicist who conducts experiments on quantum optics and atom optics.-Birth and Education:Raizen was born in New York City where generations of his family resided since the 1840s. While he comes from a long line of medical doctors, dating back to the Civil War, Raizen's life...

 proposed Atomoscience as a new paradigm with his development of these general methods beginning in 2004. His research group at The University of Texas at Austin performed the seminal experiments in 2008 that demonstrated methods that can control any element in the Periodic Table

Periodic table

The periodic table of the chemical elements is a tabular display of the 118 known chemical elements organized by selected properties of their atomic structures. Elements are presented by increasing atomic number, the number of protons in an atom's atomic nucleus...

. In January, 2010, Raizen introduced publicly the new field of Atomoscience.

The primary goal of Atomoscience is to control atoms in gas

Gas

Gas is one of the three classical states of matter . Near absolute zero, a substance exists as a solid. As heat is added to this substance it melts into a liquid at its melting point , boils into a gas at its boiling point, and if heated high enough would enter a plasma state in which the electrons...

 phase in order to build complexity as the atoms are deposited back to solid

Solid

Solid is one of the three classical states of matter . It is characterized by structural rigidity and resistance to changes of shape or volume. Unlike a liquid, a solid object does not flow to take on the shape of its container, nor does it expand to fill the entire volume available to it like a...

 phase. One proposed direction is efficient isotope separation

Isotope separation

Isotope separation is the process of concentrating specific isotopes of a chemical element by removing other isotopes, for example separating natural uranium into enriched uranium and depleted uranium. This is a crucial process in the manufacture of uranium fuel for nuclear power stations, and is...

 with key applications to medicine, energy, and basic research. Other practical applications that were proposed were the construction of novel materials from the bottom-up, such as a quantum dot

Quantum dot

A quantum dot is a portion of matter whose excitons are confined in all three spatial dimensions. Consequently, such materials have electronic properties intermediate between those of bulk semiconductors and those of discrete molecules. They were discovered at the beginning of the 1980s by Alexei...

 and a quantum wire

Quantum wire

In condensed matter physics, a quantum wire is an electrically conducting wire, in which quantum effects are affecting transport properties. Due to the quantum confinement of conduction electrons in the transverse direction of the wire, their transverse energy is quantized into a series of...

 for a new generation of lasers, nanophotonics

Nanophotonics

Nanophotonics or Nano-optics is the study of the behavior of light on the nanometer scale. It is considered as a branch of optical engineering which deals with optics, or the interaction of light with particles or substances, at deeply subwavelength length scales...

, and solar cells. Another goal of Atomoscience is to create controlled and scalable quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement occurs when electrons, molecules even as large as "buckyballs", photons, etc., interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description , which is...

 by trapping single atoms on demand. This will be used for quantum simulation and the development of a quantum computer

Quantum computer

A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from traditional computers based on transistors...

.

The University of Texas at Austin is working to establish The Laboratory for Atomoscience which will be dedicated to this new field.

External links

• Mark G. Raizen at the University of Texas at Austin
  University of Texas at Austin
  The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
  
  
• http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~quantopt/
• http://public.lanl.gov/salman/quest2010/schedule.html
• http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/blaum/events/special-seminars.en.html