An atom-sorting machine

Y. Miroshnychenko, W. Alt, I. Dotsenko, L. Förster, M. Khudaverdyan, D. Meschede, D. Schrader, A. Rauschenbeutel

Nature 442 151 (2006)

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Abstract

Laser cooling and trapping techniques allow us to control and manipulate neutral atoms. Here we rearrange, with submicrometre precision, the positions and ordering of laser-trapped atoms within strings by manipulating individual atoms with optical tweezers. Strings of equidistant atoms created in this way could serve as a scalable memory for quantum information.