Chu and colleagues use the radiation pressure of counterpropagating laser beams to confine atoms at a record low temperature (a few hundred microkelvin) and for up to almost a hundred microseconds. Their technique of cooling and trapping atoms leads to advances in precision atom spectroscopy and in studying quantum phases of matter such as the Bose-Einstein condensate.
How laser-cooling work:
a lecture by Steven Chu “From Atomic Clocks to Watching Biomolecules”:
