Explains laser cooling of neutral atoms, developed by physicists Steven Chu and William Phillips at Bell Labs and NIST, who used the Doppler effect to slow and trap atoms with lasers, cooling them to extremely low temperatures despite the counterintuitive idea that lasers normally heat things up. This work won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics. The chapter also covers the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunneling, where physicists at Berkeley (named in the transcript as John Martinez, Michelle Devet, and John Clark) showed that large systems of millions or billions of electrons can exhibit quantum tunneling and energy quantization just like single particles, a result that won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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The macroscopic quantum tunneling experiment was carried out using a Josephson junction, a superconducting circuit device.
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The original tunneling experiment was done in 1985, decades before it was recognized with the 2025 Nobel Prize.
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One host suggests laser cooling deserves its own standalone episode given how counterintuitive and rich the topic is.
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1:19:20cooling of uh neutral atoms. >> Yes. Um these were experimental physicists at Bell Labs and National Institute of Technology, Steven Chu and William Phillips. They developed methods to slow, cool, and trap neutral atoms using lasers. >> Lasers. >> Very, very counterintuitive because usually you would think, you know, you shoot a laser at something, it's going to heat it up. >> Yes. They found a way of using the Doppler effect to actually cool down atoms and bring them down to way way low temperatures. This is something that we're going to utilize later on. They won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics. Probably deserves a standalone episode from us. >> I I like that one because cool lasers.
1:20:01>> Yeah, >> it's great entry point for a video. 1985 and we did a deep dive on this one. Discovery of macroscopic quantum tunneling. >> Yep. They won the Nobel Prize just last year in 2025. These are physicists John Martinez, Michelle Devet and John Clark. They were doing an experiment at Berkeley where they showed that macroscopic systems, i.e. systems of millions and billions of electrons obey quantum mechanics just like single electrons do. And they proved that this energy quantization and macroscopic quantum tunneling is happening for an extremely large system um in a Josephson