🔬 Science 7h ago · Ben Sullivan

Physicists Squeeze Light in a Way That Has Never Been Done Before

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Inside a radio-frequency trap at Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, a single strontium ion hangs in a vacuum, cooled to near stillness, vibrating with an energy so close to nothing that quantum mechanics itself sets the floor. The ion is about ten nanometres across. Its motion is the harmonic oscillator, the same mathematical beast that describes a child’s swing, a plucked guitar string, the electromagnetic shiver of light itself. For decades, physicists have been squeezing that motion,

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