If you make your components small enough, eventually this van-der-Waals potential starts to
become the dominant interaction," said Vincent Lonij, a graduate student in the UA department of physics
who led the research as part of his doctoral thesis.
Graduate student Vincent Lonij(left), associate professor of physics Alex Cronin,
research assistant Will Holmgren and undergraduate student Catherine Klauss perform maintenance on a chamber used to beam atoms through a grating to measure a tiny force that helps physicists better understand the structure of atoms.