Nearly a century after Danish physicist Niels Bohr offered his planet-like model of the hydrogen atom, a Rice University-led team of physicists has created giant, millimeter-sized atoms that resemble it more closely than any other experimental realization yet achieved. The research is available online in Physical Review Letters. The team used lasers and electric fields to coax potassium atoms into a precise configuration with one point-like, "localized" electron orbiting far from the nucleus.
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