Atomic physics: a renewed vitality

In 1951 I had just accepted a job as assistant professor at New York University. I was at the time a postdoc working in Jerrold Zacharias’s atomic‐beams laboratory at MIT. My PhD thesis (at NYU) had been in the field that was then called “gas discharges”, and now has the more dignified appellation of gaseous electronics. I wondered what kind of experiment to set up, upon my return to NYU, that would effectively exploit my rather minimal expertise in two seemingly disparate fields, one involving complex macroscopic phenomena in the gas phase, the other an elegant, though technically challenging field that dealt with atoms one at a time.

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