FDA Regulation and Patient Assisted Suicides

There are an increasing number of Americans who believe that the marginal benefit of surviving a few extra months is not worth the cost of suffering the pain, physical and/or mental deterioration, or increased dependency they would experience during that period due to a terminal illness or a debilitating condition. For these people, the right to opt to die painlessly, simply, and with dignity at the time and place of their choosing is paramount, and in recent years they have taken steps to secure that right. Their convictions have given rise to the Hemlock Society, the passage of an Oregon referendum authorizing physician-assisted suicide, and the work of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has personally assisted in the suicide of 20 people as of December 1993 using two patient-activated devices he created himself. Society has rarely strongly opposed the exercise of this "right;" indeed, while 28 states currently have laws declaring assistance in suicide a crime, no physician has been convicted for aiding in a suicide, and conviction of other types of suicide assistants has been sporadic at best. On the other hand, Michigan did ultimately prohibit physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in order to legally stop Dr. Kevorkian, and an injunction has prohibited enforcement of Oregon's referendum pending the resolution of constitutional challenges

3D Projection Sideband Cooling

We demonstrate 3D microwave projection sideband cooling of trapped, neutral atoms. The technique employs state-dependent potentials that enable microwave photons to drive vibration-number reducing transitions. The particular cooling sequence we employ uses minimal spontaneous emission, and works even for relatively weakly bound atoms. We cool 76% of atoms to their 3D vibrational ground states in a site-resolvable 3D optical lattice.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Supplemental Material included. To appear in Physical Review Letter

Producing Bose condensates using optical lattices

We relate the entropies of ensembles of atoms in optical lattices to atoms in simple traps. We then determine which ensembles of lattice-bound atoms will adiabatically transform into a Bose condensate. This shows a feasible approach to Bose condensation without evaporative cooling.Comment: RevTeX, 5 pages, 5 eps-figure

Site-resolved Bragg scattering

We numerically calculate the reliability with which one can optically determine the presence or absence of an individual scatterer in a randomly occupied 3D array of well-localized, coherently radiating scatterers. The reliability depends in a complicated way on the ratio of lattice spacing to wavelength and the numerical aperture of the imaging system. The behavior can be qualitatively understood by considering the dependence of Bragg scattering modes on lattice spacing. These results are of interest for atomic implementations of quantum information processing