EurekAlert
By UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
June 10, 2022
Imagining our everyday life without lasers is difficult. We use lasers in printers, CD players, pointers, measuring devices, and so on. What makes lasers so special is that they use coherent waves of light: all the light inside a laser vibrates completely in sync. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics tells us that particles like atoms should also be thought of as waves. As a result, we can build ‘atom lasers’ containing coherent waves of matter. But can we make these matter waves last, so that they may be used in applications? In research that was published in Nature this week, a team of Amsterdam physicists shows that the answer to this question is affirmative.