News: CUA in the News

Wed April 2, 2025

CUA Alumn Revolutionizes Baseball

When Aaron Leanhardt was a graduate student in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was part of a research team that cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history. What his colleagues didn’t realize was that in the rare moments when Leanhardt wasn’t toiling away at the lab, he was moonlighting...
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CUA in the News
Fri December 20, 2024

Lukin Group wins Physics World Breakthrough of the Year 2024

The Physics World 2024 Breakthrough of the Year goes to Mikhail Lukin, Dolev Bluvstein and colleagues at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and QuEra Computing, and independently to Hartmut Neven and colleagues at Google Quantum AI and their collaborators, for demonstrating quantum error correction on an atomic processor with 48 logical qubits, and for implementing quantum error correction below the surface code threshold in a superconducting chip,...
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CUA in the News
Research Highlights
Thu November 2, 2023

The power of representation and connectivity in STEM education

CUA postdoc Edwin Pendrozo-Peñafiel served as one of the organizers for Bridging Talents and Opportunities: On Oct. 13 and 14 at the Wong Auditorium at MIT, an event called Bridging Talents and Opportunities took place. It was part of an initiative led by MIT Latinx professors and students aimed at providing talented Latinx high school...
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CUA in the News
Outreach News
Thu October 19, 2023

Harvard-MIT CUA Receives Major Renewal Grant

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Physics Frontiers Centers program renewed a grant to the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms (CUA) to fund exploring, understanding, and harnessing mysterious phenomena at the frontiers of physics. The CUA, which works to enable greater control and programmability of quantum-entangled systems of low-temperature atoms and molecules, will conduct experiments involving...
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Community News
CUA in the News
Tue January 31, 2023

CUA Makes Physics World’s Top Ten of 2022

Physics World recognizes Professor John Doyle’s lab for creating some of the world’s first ultracold polyatomic molecules. The lab produced sodium hydroxide at 110 µK.
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CUA in the News
Wed January 12, 2022

Physicists watch as ultracold atoms form a crystal of quantum tornadoes

The new observations record a key crossover from classical to quantum behavior.

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CUA in the News
Research Highlights
Fri December 10, 2021

Physics World: Top 10 Breakthroughs of 2021

CUA research has been selected as one of the Top 10 Breakthroughs of 2021 by Physics World.  The selected research is the observation of Pauli blocking of light scattering by the Ketterle group.
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CUA in the News
Mon December 6, 2021

Wolfgang Ketterle on RT News

Wolfgang Ketterle explains recent research results for RT – the world’s most-watched news network on YouTube: “Invisible atoms? MIT physicists make invisible matter”
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CUA in the News
Outreach News
Mon November 22, 2021

How ultracold, superdense atoms become invisible

An atom’s electrons are arranged in energy shells. Like concertgoers in an arena, each electron occupies a single chair and cannot drop to a lower tier if all its chairs are occupied. This fundamental property of atomic physics is known as the Pauli exclusion principle, and it explains the shell structure of atoms, the diversity...
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CUA in the News
Research Highlights
Sun February 7, 2021

‘Spooky action at a distance’ could create a nearly perfect clock

Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that’s so precise, it will be used to detect subtle disturbances in space-time or to find the elusive dark matter that tugs on everything yet emits no light. The ticking of this clock will be almost perfect. That dream may not be far off:...
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News type:
CUA in the News