Light Plays Atoms

Atoms are studied being closely, almost inseparably, related with light. The simple symmetries and regular motions of atoms are often used to probe the precise properties of light, and also various new phenomena of atoms are created, probed, and applied by light. In particular, atom cooling and trapping by laser enabled extreme cold matters in temperature below 10^-12 Kevin, and also ultra-precise clocks with uncertainty of below 10^-18.� In this talk prepared for undergraduate and graduate students majoring physics, I present two experiments from our lab, related with the laser atom cooling and trapping. First one is to use laser to sequentially modify the atomic states to use the atom-laser combination in a way of processing the quantum information (qubit), and the second is to arrange the atoms in space and rearrange them by light.