Quantum mechanics is the physics of the very small and the very cold. When particles are small and cold they take on wave properties and thus act differently to anything you can imagine in the world you see around you. Throwing tennis balls through brick walls, walking through two adjacent doors at the same time, even having a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time might seem weird to you, but in quantum mechanics this is quite normal. It is this strange playground of physics that has

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... attracted people to quantum mechanics, and the advent of cold atom technologies allows us to, not only theoretically but physically, study these weird systems. In recent years, cold atoms have provided an excellent testbed for investigating these quantum effects. As the system is cold, it is incredibly clean and noise-free due to the lack of thermal vibrations and collisions ...