Phys.org  July 13, 2022 Cooling some atomic gases confers unique and sometimes useful properties to the atoms. The use of magneto optical traps (MOTs) for cooling works on only a small number of atomic groups on the periodic table. Rather than a ground state transition, researchers in Singapore used a transition from a more long-lived metastable state in their MOT. This required modifying it to work with just indium atoms. Once the reconfiguration was completed, the researchers created a cloud made up of more than 500 million indium-115 atoms in their MOT and cooled the atoms to approximately 1 mK […]