Who will be the future Nobel laureates?

The Wall Street Journal listed possible winners for this year and the future. There is also one scientist from Atomic, Molecular and Optical physics community - Daniel Kleppner (MIT).

Some metastable states live pretty long

Usually, speaking about metastable states in atoms we assume that those decay very fast, say, faster than a microsecond. But not in a Helium atom - its metastable state lives for extremely long time.

In the ground state helium has two electrons on the 1s shell, one of which can be excited to the 2s shell, using inelastic electron scattering. In such a way the metastable helium He* is obtained. The thing is that the transition 2s->1s is dipole forbidden, and the lifetime becomes huge: a recent investigation of Hodgman with colleagues shows it to be 7870 seconds, which is longer than 2 hours.

Well, that's a good opportunity to take some sleep during the experiment.

Bose-Einstein condensation of calcium achieved

Scientists from Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (German national metrology institute) in Braunsweig recently obtained a Bose-Einstein condensate from about 20 000 calcium atoms. This is the first successful attempt to condense alkaline earth species.

Up to now, Bose-condensation was achieved in atomic gases of a number of alkalis (Li, Na, K, Rb, and Cs), and also of ytterbium, chromium, hydrogen, and metastable helium.