Thought the following item might be of interest to the list ....

Frigid atoms warm up with laser love

Who said you can't measure love? Scientists have done it at the atomic
level, cracking a 40-year mystery in one of the hottest fields in
physics: atom lasers.

The team's precise calculations of the 'love-hate' behaviour of atoms
at ultra-low temperatures might one day form the basis of
interplanetary navigation, said the researchers whose work appears in
the journal, Physical Review Letters.

"It's difficult to predict the applications in a field like this,"
said Professor Peter Drummond of the University of Queensland, one of
the authors of the study. "It's really new science."

The work builds on the eight-year-old discovery of a new state of
matter known as the Bose-Einstein condensate, in which atoms chilled
to a super-cool state and confined to a sphere, take on unusual
properties.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s918573.htm