David J. Wineland: trapping ions for clocks and computers

Simon Thwaite recently completed a D.Phil. in Atomic & Laser Physics at the University of Oxford, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The first part of his post series commenting on the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics can be found here. In this post he gives an overview of the field of trapped ions, describes two of its most important applications, and describes what goes on behind the scenes when a trapped ion interacts with a laser […]