Nicholas Bigelow, a professor of physics and optics at the University of Rochester, has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. Bigelow was elected for his research on ultracold atomic vapors, in which individual atoms interact in unusual ways; the control of atomic motion using the pressure of light; and the creation and manipulation of ultracold mixtures. His current projects include the creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate comprised of two different types of atoms. "The condensate is a state of matter achieved when a cloud of gas is cooled to near absolute zero, and the atoms of the gas take on the peculiar characteristic of behaving as if they were a single, giant atom," the university said in a press release. "So far, this bizarre state has only been achieved with atoms of a single kind of gas, but Bigelow is attempting to learn if two different kinds of gas can still create the single-atom state of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The results shed light on how atoms behave at some of the most basic levels." Bigelow is a member of the Rochester Quantum Information Center and the University of Rochester’s Materials Science Program and is a cohort of the Rochester Theory Center for Optical Science and Engineering.    . . .    iPAL, an online database of opportunities to license Sandia National Laboratories' intellectual property, is now available to the public. Sandia said the purpose of iPAL (intellectual property available for licensing) is to show Sandia technologies that might not be fully utilized in the commercial marketplace and to help companies move promising technologies toward commercialization. For more information, visit: ipal.sandia.gov