Last Friday, Theodor W. Haensch came to Heidelberg “Physikalisches Kolloquium”. The big lecture hall was filled up and quite a few people had to seat in the hall way. Some of the colleagues brought chairs from office. The speech was really great. Theodor showed how he had been curiously stuck to hydrogen spectrum. They developed a bunch of laser based techniques to do high-precision measurements of time/frequency, length and physical constants which finally led to the 2005 Nobel prize.
The audience may be attracted by Haensch’s basic rules, e.g. “Do not measure the atoms but Hydrogen”, “Do not measure the wavelength but the frequency”. Measuring the simplest system of most fundamental means with the state-of-the-art techniques, they have harvested unprecedented achievements. They are pushing continuously the frontier of fundamental quantum physics.
What will merit greatly the scientists doing fundamental research is the religion of curiosity-driven research as shown in Haensch’s drawing of chickens attached below, though it may be arguable.
他有没有评论他去年参与的对muon兰姆移位的测量
有啊，报告最后阶段提的。他们现在对反氢原子产生极大兴趣了，不是有1000秒的反氢原子的稳定俘获时间了吗。如果成功了测量反氢原子光谱了，那又是非常了不起的工作了。
那个1000s的只有几个反氢原子吧。反氢原子光谱很重要，但是要达到Hansch在氢原子方面的精度还有很长的路要走。