Simpler laser cooling offers route to chip-scale cold atom devices 27 Jan 2021 NIST project employs metasurface beam shaping and planar optics. Caught in a trap: laser cooling Laser cooling, in which carefully arranged laser beams can reduce the momentum of an atom to the point where the it can be individually caught by a magnetic field, is an important technology for future quantum networking and other applications. The optical platforms to produce and trap these cold atoms have to date tended to be large and complex, limiting the practical uses to which the principle has been put. A project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has now developed a more straightforward approach, potentially opening the way to chip-scale manufacturable devices utilizing cold atoms.