ATTA instrument

Chun-Yen Chen aligns the laser beams of the table-top krypton dating setup. To operate the magneto-optical trap requires at least 10 mW of laser light, compared with only around 1 pW of light emitted by a captured atom. The main challenge when detecting single atoms is to reduce the background photons scattered off walls, windows, and even the optics outside the vacuum chamber (image credit: ANL)

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