Physical Review Letters is celebrating its Z=79 anniversary, and highlighting important letters. This week is:<\/p>\n
Letters from the Past \u2014 A PRL Retrospective: This week’s Milestone Letter was originally published in 1970<\/p>\n
Acceleration and Trapping of Particles by Radiation Pressure This was a description of radiation pressure on transparent latex spheres, which felt a force when placed in laser light that had a gradient \u2014 the refraction gives rise to a force, or pressure, because the power is asymmetric across the sphere \u2014 the light changes direction, so the sphere must recoil, and the amount of recoil doesn’t balance. This is a precursor to a dipole force trap<\/a>, which traps atoms at a field maximum (or minimum) of a light field, e.g. from focused laser. It also lays out radiation pressure by near-resonant scattering<\/p>\n The absorption and isotropic reradiation by spontaneous emission of resonance radiation striking an atom results in an average driving force or pressure in the direction of the incident light<\/p><\/blockquote>\n which was the idea that led to laser cooling and optical molasses<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is also a brief summary of the laser cooling history there this month, Landmarks: Laser Cooling of Atoms<\/a> that takes you through the milestones up until the Nobel prizes for laser cooling and Bose-Einstein condensates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Physical Review Letters is celebrating its Z=79 anniversary, and highlighting important letters. This week is: Letters from the Past \u2014 A PRL Retrospective: This week’s Milestone Letter was originally published in 1970 Acceleration and Trapping of Particles by Radiation Pressure … Continue reading
\nA. Ashkin Phys. Rev. Lett. 24<\/strong>, 156 (1970)<\/p>\n