Imagine plucking a guitar string. It vibrates, the sound lingers, and then fades away as the energy drains into the air. Now bring this scene down to the scale of an atom. Can an atom vibrate in the ...

A Vermont research team has cracked a 90-year-old puzzle, creating a quantum version of the damped harmonic oscillator. By reformulating Lamb’s classical model, they showed how atomic vibrations can ...

When a guitar string is plucked or a playground swing is set in motion, the movement gradually fades away. Physicists call these “damped harmonic oscillators,” and Newton’s laws do a fine job of ...