Posted on May 25, 2006

Chad Orzel, professor of physics, and Mike Mastroianni '07 presented a poster at the 37th annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) of the American Physical Society in Knoxville, Tenn., recently. “An Optically Excited Metastable Krypton Atomic Beam Source” described work that began as a summer research project for Mastroianni. It involves a novel way of preparing atoms in a particular state that will be used to cool and trap them with lasers, as part of a project to measure radioactive backgrounds by detecting single krypton atoms. The project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, with Mastroianni's travel supported by a DAMOP grant. The annual international research conference draws some 1,000 physicists.