Having A Blast With Cold Atoms

Abstract

There’s no mistaking it: Jabez J. McClelland’s lab at the National Institute of Standards & Technology is a physics lab. Mechanical whirring of indeterminate origin? Check. Shiny stainless steel chambers wrapped in coils of copper wire? You bet. Lasers? Oh yes, there are lasers. There is so much lasing going on that McClelland has hidden some of the optics to make the instrument he’s working on look less intimidating to people who aren’t laser-loving physicists. But this machine, like so many born in physics labs, has great promise for chemistry. This machine makes ion beams. Researchers of all stripes have long relied on narrowly focused ion beams to sculpt and probe materials at the nanoscale. This sculpting is used in a variety of applications, such as patterning microelectronic devices or extracting minuscule amounts of material for further analysis by mass spectrometry or other techniques. Ion beams can also image samples