Dr Gaby Slavcheva

In the last decade or so, physicists have been able to create ‘artificial atoms’ using microfabrication techniques borrowed from the microchip industry. These 'artificial atoms', called quantum dots, have dimensions which are comparable to real atoms: approximately 1-100 nano metres in size.

Quantum dots exhibit many of the strange properties found in real atoms and they may be engineered to provide specific effects. In these lenticular images we see a theoretical model of quantum dot being excited by very short laser pulses (fifty million millionths of a second long) and the resulting excitation and relaxation from several quantized energy levels (in this case they are called ‘hot trion’ states): an effect commonly found in real atoms.