{"id":4644,"date":"2010-01-27T03:00:17","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T08:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=4644"},"modified":"2010-01-27T03:00:17","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T08:00:17","slug":"a-little-smack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/4644","title":{"rendered":"A Little Smack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/01\/laser_smackdown_the_most_amazi.php\">Laser Smackdown: The Most Amazing Use of a Laser?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Chad asks the question in general, but I am going to personalize it.  I&#8217;ve had the opportunity to do some neat things with lasers, mostly related to laser cooling and trapping.  I&#8217;ve trapped K-37, K-38(m), K-40, K-41, Rb-85, Rb-87, and Cs-133 (the first two of those being radioactive isotopes with half-lives of around one second) and in each case, made a slow atomic beam to send the atoms somewhere else so we could use them for whatever reason depending on the experiment.   Making state-of-the-art atomic clocks?  Pretty cool.  I&#8217;ve made holograms, which are a not-too-shabby use.<\/p>\n<p>But the neatest thing I ever did happened in grad school, while we were still building up to cooling and trapping.  There was a science summer school in session, and our lab set up a demonstration:  we took our <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/3199\">home-built lasers <\/a> and modulated the current being sent to them by tapping in to the output jack of a boombox.  Then we sent the beam across the lab and onto a photodiode, and sent the AC output into another boombox.  Music sent across the room on a beam of light!  Essentially fiber-optic data transmission without the fiber, so we could show the students that blocking the beam stopped the music, and while this is standard (even boring) today and wasn&#8217;t really new even then, I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done (to that point, anyway).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laser Smackdown: The Most Amazing Use of a Laser? Chad asks the question in general, but I am going to personalize it. I&#8217;ve had the opportunity to do some neat things with lasers, mostly related to laser cooling and trapping. &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/4644\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lab-stories","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}