Opening Address Atomic physics today

摘要

The statement of a Report for the US Government in 1991 on the significance and future of atomic physics can be regarded as a prediction:"Atomic physics has an intellectually exciting future.Topics of immediate activity span the range from single-atom physics to surface interactions and from collisions at milli-Kelvin temperatures to relativistic collisions.Atomic systems provide a laboratory for probing fundamental questions in physics,such as new tests of quantum electrodynamics,interactions with antimatter,parity violation,and quantum and classical chaos and few-body quantum dynamics"(Future Research Opportunities in Atomic,Molecular and Optical Physics,1991).