Cover Story
Optical Chaos
Peter W. Milonni, Jay R. Ackerhalt, and Mei-Li Shih
Notions of order and chaos go back a long way. The Greeks held that all motion could be decomposed into "perfect" circular motions, and this belief led to the theory of planetary epicycles. We might phrase the Platonic ideal this way... more>>
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Kirchhoff's law
J. H. Taylor
Editor's note: This is the third of 11 monthly installments of lecture demonstrations on radiation exchange, by J.H. Taylor of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn. Next month's topic: Radiant emissivity. more>>
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Laser cooling and electromagnetic trapping of atoms
Harold Metcalf
The new field of laser control of
atomic motion, spanning optics,
statistical mechanics, and
atomic physics, is developing at a very rapid rate. Its status was defined last year at a summer school organized by Stig Stenholm of the Research Institute for Theoretical Physics in Helsinki,
Finland. About 80 scientists met to discuss the present and future of laser cooling and trapping of atoms. (This is a subject with a meager past—there were no laser cooling experiments before
1978.) The following report is
both a brief review of the status of the field, based on the summer school, and a summary of more recent developments. more>>