In addition to her own experiments and research, she is often invited to speak at international conferences, and is involved in structuring the science policies of various institutions.

In 1991 she joined the Rowland Institute for Science at Cambridge, Massachusetts as a scientific staff member, beginning to explore the possibilities of slow light and cold atoms.

Her formalized training is in theoretical physics but her interest moved to experimental research in an effort to create a new form of matter known as a Bose–Einstein condensate.

"Hau applied to the National Science Foundation for funds to make a batch of this condensate but was rejected on the grounds that she was a theorist for whom such experiments would be too difficult to do.

The new study is "a beautiful demonstration", says Irina Novikova, a physicist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. Before this result, she says, light storage was measured in milliseconds.

Her research blurs the boundaries between basic and applied science, draws on the talent and people of two Schools and several departments, and provides a literally glowing example of how taking daring intellectual risks leads to profound rewards.

They then launched this millimeter-long atomic cloud towards a suspended carbon nanotube, located some two centimeters away and charged to hundreds of volts.

[16] They observed that most atoms passed by, but approximately 10 per million were inescapably attracted, causing them to dramatically accelerate both in movement and in temperature.

"At this point, the speeding atoms separate into an electron and an ion rotating in parallel around the nanowire, completing each orbit in just a few trillionths of a second.

The team is quick to note that this effect is not produced by gravity, as calculated in blackholes that exist in space, but by the high electrical charge in the nanotube.

The experiment combines nanotechnology with cold atoms to demonstrate a new type of high-resolution, single-atom, chip-integrated detector that may ultimately be able to resolve fringes from the interference of matter waves.