Dr. Kang-Kuen Ni

Optical tweezers, made from tightly focused laser beams are versatile tools to manipulate small particles for studies in physics, chemistry, and biology. In this talk I will focus on an application where we use tweezers to grab single atoms from a laser-cooled ensemble and assemble pairs of single atoms into molecules with full quantum state control. This work goes beyond the usual paradigm of chemical reactions that proceed via stochastic encounters between reactants, to a single, controlled reaction of exactly two atoms. We aim to use these single molecules as building blocks for quantum simulators and computers.