Light Pushes Atoms (IMAGE)
Caption
A pencil-like laser beam can be made by intersecting two infinitely wide light waves at a small angle. One might think that an atom would absorb a photon randomly from only one of the beams, as depicted in the section labeled a), but Gibble's paper shows that the atom recoils with a speed that is less than it would get from the momentum of either of the infinitely wide photons, with no sideways recoil, as depicted in b).
Credit
Kurt Gibble, Penn State
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