Ultracold plasmas come of age

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Abstract
During the past decade, the availability of simple, effective methods for laser cooling and trapping has enabled enormous advances in the experimental study of atoms in their ground state. Until quite recently, however, these techniques have had much less impact on investigations of highly excited atoms – and almost none on plasmas. Several laboratories have now begun experiments in which atoms are initially prepared in the ground state at sub-millikelvin temperatures and then excited by a laser to very high electronic states, or even ionized. The result is a gas in which the atoms are in a highly excited state but move very slowly. This unusual scenario is, in reality, quite attainable – although the system is intrinsically unstable.

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