Counting Atoms with Glass Fiber

Glass fiber cables are indispensable for the internet - now they can also be used as a quantum physics lab. The Vienna University of Technology is the only research facility in the world, where single atoms can be controllably coupled to the light in ultra-thin fiber glass. Specially prepared light waves interact with very small numbers of atoms, which makes it possible to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to tiny trace amounts of a substance. Professor Arno Rauschenbeutel's team, one of six research groups at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, has presented this new method in the journal "Physical Review Letters". The research project was carried out in collaboration with the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Ultra-Thin Glass Fibers - The glass fibers used for the experiment are only five hundred millionths of a millimeter thick (500 nm). In fact, they are even thinner than the wavelength of visible light.