Two teams couple remote ions using a wire conductor

Two teams of researchers working independently have succeeded in coupling remotely located ions using a wire conductor. Both teams showed that individual particles can sense one another through the mirrored charges they generate—in this case, through a metal wire. In the first effort, a team at the University of California at Berkeley connected two ions over a small span and slowed the cooling in one by cooling the other. In the second effort, an international team of researchers successfully cooled a second ion by cooling the first and applying a resonator to the wire. The first team published their results in the journal Physical Review Letters; the second team published their work in the journal Nature.