Putting artificial atoms on the clock

Around the turn of the century, scientists began to understand that atoms have discrete energy levels. Within the field of quantum physics, this sparked the development of quantum optics in which light is used to drive atoms between these energy levels. The resulting ability to control the behavior of solid-state systems with free-space light -- the former has discrete energy levels and the latter has continuously tunable energy -- yielded new fundamental science as well as new technology. Some of the applications that emerged include lasers, atomic clocks and quantum information processing.

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