Abstract
The fundamental quest to know more about the nature of the world around us and the universe of which it is both an incomprehensibly insignificant part, objectively speaking, and a rather important part, subjectively speaking, has driven mankind to the edge of sanity and sometimes beyond. Amidst all of this, cold atoms can be seen as the ideal prototypical system with which to explore nature. In contrast to the sledgehammer approach so typical of high-energy physics experiments, clouds of ultracold matter provide an almost blank canvas that one can use as a microscope to probe the behaviour of matter at the atomic, and even subatomic, scale. Optical cooling is perhaps the only direct way of producing these ultracold clouds.
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Notes
- 1.
I am somewhat fond, however unfairly, of mentioning string theory in this context. See Ref. [1] for an overview into the birth of string theory that suggests otherwise.
- 2.
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Xuereb, A. (2012). Introduction. In: Optical Cooling Using the Dipole Force. Springer Theses. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29715-1_1
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