Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder Colorado, found a way to hold several thousand ions of beryllium in place with electric fields (the pot). An ion is an atom that has one or more electrons stripped off. By applying a burst of radio waves at a particular frequency for 256 milliseconds, they were able to get almost 100% of the ions to move up to the next energy state (boiling pot) which was called level 2. The NIST team developed a neat trick for looking at the ions while they were 'making up their minds' about which state to be in. They did this by shooting a very brief flicker of laser light into the quantum pot. The energy was matched to ions in level 1, so that they would go up the level 3, and would bounce back to level 1 in much less than a millisecond. As they bounced back, these excited ions emitted characteristic photons which could be detected and counted. If the ions were 'looked at' by the laser pulse after 128 milliseconds, just half of them were found in level 1 as expected. But if the researchers 'peeked' four times during the 256 milliseconds at equal intervals, 2/3 of them were in level 1 at the end. And if they peeked 64 times, almost all were in level 1. Even though the radio waves had been doing their best to warm the ions up (and the laser added more energy), the watched quantum pot had refused to boil.
Quantum Mysteries Part 4. The Watched Pot Never Boils
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