Laser atomic physics laboratory

The atomic grenade process

Atomic physics with nano-grenades

Chief investigator  Associate Professor Robert Sang

The Laser Atomic Physics Laboratory is equipped with two fully functional rare gas metastable atomic beam lines. Metastable atoms are atoms that have long lived electronic excited states with high internal energy. This energy can be transferred to other atoms in a spectacular explosive interaction. This makes the atoms easy to detect and they can also be utilised to modify structures on surfaces. The two apparatus in the laboratory are used for different experiments; one of the apparatus is used to slow and trap metastable neon atoms to investigate slow collision interactions between atoms. The second apparatus is used for atom optics experiments in which the centre-of-mass motion of atoms are manipulated using electromagnetic fields, of particular interest to us is the creation of nanostructures using atom optics.