atomic physics

atomic physics, the scientific study of the structure of the atom, its energy states, and its interactions with other particles and with electric and magnetic fields. Atomic physics has proved to be a spectacularly successful application of quantum mechanics, which is one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

The notion that matter is made of fundamental building blocks dates to the ancient Greeks, who speculated that earth, air, fire, and water might form the basic elements from which the physical world is constructed. They also developed various schools of thought about the ultimate nature of matter. Perhaps the most remarkable was the atomist school founded by the ancient Greeks Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Thrace about 440 bc. For purely philosophical reasons, and without benefit of experimental evidence, they developed the notion that matter consists of indivisible and indestructible atoms. The atoms are in ceaseless motion through the surrounding void and collide with one another like billiard balls, much like the modern kinetic theory of gases. However, the necessity for a void (or vacuum) between the atoms raised new questions that could not be easily answered. For this reason, the atomist picture was rejected by Aristotle and the Athenian school in favour of the notion that matter is continuous. The idea nevertheless persisted, and it reappeared 400 years later in the writings of the Roman poet Lucretius, in his work De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).

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Little more was done to advance the idea that matter might be made of tiny particles until the 17th century. The English physicist Isaac Newton, in his Principia Mathematica (1687), proposed that Boyle’s law, which states that the product of the pressure and the volume of a gas is constant at the same temperature, could be explained if one assumes that the gas is composed of particles. In 1808 the English chemist John Dalton suggested that each element consists of identical atoms, and in 1811 the Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro hypothesized that the particles of elements may consist of two or more atoms stuck together. Avogadro called such conglomerations molecules, and, on the basis of experimental work, he conjectured that the molecules in a gas of hydrogen or oxygen are formed from pairs of atoms.

During the 19th century there developed the idea of a limited number of elements, each consisting of a particular type of atom, that could combine in an almost limitless number of ways to form chemical compounds. At mid-century the kinetic theory of gases successfully attributed such phenomena as the pressure and viscosity of a gas to the motions of atomic and molecular particles. By 1895 the growing weight of chemical evidence and the success of the kinetic theory left little doubt that atoms and molecules were real.

The internal structure of the atom, however, became clear only in the early 20th century with the work of the British physicist Ernest Rutherford and his students. Until Rutherford’s efforts, a popular model of the atom had been the so-called “plum-pudding” model, advocated by the English physicist Joseph John Thomson, which held that each atom consists of a number of electrons (plums) embedded in a gel of positive charge (pudding); the total negative charge of the electrons exactly balances the total positive charge, yielding an atom that is electrically neutral. Rutherford conducted a series of scattering experiments that challenged Thomson’s model. Rutherford observed that when a beam of alpha particles (which are now known to be helium nuclei) struck a thin gold foil, some of the particles were deflected backward. Such large deflections were inconsistent with the plum-pudding model.

This work led to Rutherford’s atomic model, in which a heavy nucleus of positive charge is surrounded by a cloud of light electrons. The nucleus is composed of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons, each of which is approximately 1,836 times as massive as the electron. Because atoms are so minute, their properties must be inferred by indirect experimental techniques. Chief among these is spectroscopy, which is used to measure and interpret the electromagnetic radiation emitted or absorbed by atoms as they undergo transitions from one energy state to another. Each chemical element radiates energy at distinctive wavelengths, which reflect their atomic structure. Through the procedures of wave mechanics, the energies of atoms in various energy states and the characteristic wavelengths they emit may be computed from certain fundamental physical constants—namely, electron mass and charge, the speed of light, and Planck’s constant. Based on these fundamental constants, the numerical predictions of quantum mechanics can account for most of the observed properties of different atoms. In particular, quantum mechanics offers a deep understanding of the arrangement of elements in the periodic table, showing, for example, that elements in the same column of the table should have similar properties.

In recent years the power and precision of lasers have revolutionized the field of atomic physics. On the one hand, lasers have dramatically increased the precision with which the characteristic wavelengths of atoms can be measured. For example, modern standards of time and frequency are based on measurements of transition frequencies in atomic cesium (see atomic clock), and the definition of the metre as a unit of length is now related to frequency measurements through the velocity of light. In addition, lasers have made possible entirely new technologies for isolating individual atoms in electromagnetic traps and cooling them to near absolute zero. When the atoms are brought essentially to rest in the trap, they can undergo a quantum mechanical phase transition to form a superfluid known as a Bose-Einstein condensation, while remaining in the form of a dilute gas. In this new state of matter, all the atoms are in the same coherent quantum state. As a consequence, the atoms lose their individual identities, and their quantum mechanical wavelike properties become dominant. The entire condensate then responds to external influences as a single coherent entity (like a school of fish), instead of as a collection of individual atoms. Recent work has shown that a coherent beam of atoms can be extracted from the trap to form an “atom laser” analogous to the coherent beam of photons in a conventional laser. The atom laser is still in an early stage of development, but it has the potential to become a key element of future technologies for the fabrication of microelectronic and other nanoscale devices.