![]() ![]() It’s just that previously, physicists couldn’t negotiate which property of the ion would contain the uncertainty in a particular moment. To be clear, squeezing doesn’t violate the uncertainty principle. At this level of precision, they inevitably brush against one of nature’s unbreakable rules: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. His team wants to pin down the location of the moving ion to less than a nanometer, a fraction of the ion’s own diameter. Slichter is working with an object many thousands of times smaller than a bacterium. It’s much more challenging than it sounds. All they want to do is locate the ion-to watch the motion of the ball as it jiggles back and forth on the chip. Their game, though, is simpler than pinball. Outside the freezer, Slichter’s team hits keys and turns knobs to bat the ion around with electric pulses. ![]() ![]() Confined by an electric force field, the ion hovers 30 microns above the surface of the chip. The chip, a square of gold-coated sapphire with metal wires bonded to it, holds a single magnesium ion. He and his colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have built a chip about the size of a grain of rice, which they keep in a small freezer at around −430 degrees Fahrenheit. In a lab in Boulder, Colorado, physicist Daniel Slichter plays an excruciatingly tiny version of pinball-with an individual atom as the ball. ![]()
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