Imagine plucking a guitar string. It vibrates, the sound lingers, and then fades away as the energy drains into the air. Now bring this scene down to the scale of an atom. Can an atom vibrate in the ...

A plucked guitar string can vibrate for seconds before falling silent. A playground swing, emptied of its passenger, will gradually come to rest. These are what physicists call "damped harmonic ...

A Vermont research team has cracked a 90-year-old puzzle, creating a quantum version of the damped harmonic oscillator. By reformulating Lamb’s classical model, they showed how atomic vibrations can ...