maniack writes "I saw a cool link over at HardOCP about supercooling atoms with lasers. It's a little technical and hard to read, but I though the slashdot community might be interested. Who knows, with this technology, maybe I'll be able to overclock my p2-266 to 1 GHz after all."
Cooling of energetic ion beams to high phase-space densities represents a challenging issue with great importance for present an future experiments performed at storage rings. The dynamics of ultracold and dense particle beams is a widely unexplored research field dealing with interesting new, collective beam phenomena. Laser cooling, which was introduced to ion storage rings in the early '90s, turns out to be a very efficient method for beam cooling towards high phase-space densities [1,2]. The resonant light pressure foce acting on the ions provides an extremely strong damping force resulting in very low beam temperatures. At these low temperatures, the plasma parameter G, defined as the ratio of the Coulomb potential energy between nearest neighbor ions to the thermal kinetic energy per ion becomes larger than one already at moderate densities. For a one component plasma with G>1, a phase transition into a Coulomb ordered state takes place. An ion crystal circulating in a storage ring at great speed uniquely combines high energy beam physics with the physics of strongly coupled plasmas[3]. The setup of the experiment is described here. In a storage ring, only the longitudinal degree of freedom can be directly cooled very efficiently. However, we could demonstrate tranverse beam cooling by a coupling through Intra beam Coulomb scattering [4]. In addition, we have introduced a novel method for indirect transverse cooling based on a single-particle interaction of ions with the laser light (dispersive cooling). In the course of the last year, we have made important progress in laser cooling towards crystalline beams which has led us to new interesting results. The observations are consistent with the formation of a crystalline ion beam:
Here we can kill two very important computer problems with one proverbial stone! And even reap a nifty side effect as well!
Problem one: The heat problem. Computers have it, and this represents an alternative to other methods. It has a few definate advantages over traditional heat sinks.
Problem two: Just think how cool the inside of your computer could look with some of these babies installed! Flashing lights! Cool lasers! You might even be able to get them to do cool scanline effects! You might even end up leaving your case off, to both facilitate air flow, and to enjoy the cool techo-ness of the inside of your computer! Get a fog machine, and your heat sink could probably match anything you see at a concert or other "professional" laser show!
Nifty side effect: Lasers are cool! They are one of those items which for some reason, are simply undeniably cool. (Other examples include lightsabers, NINJAs, and walls covered entirely by TV screens and flashing LEDs.) So if you put something that cool in your computer, then your computer will become slightly cooler by proximity, and you, as the owner of the now coolness-enhanced machine will find yourself reaping the benifits of coolness as well!
And THAT's what the point is!
Re:What is the point of this
by
yuggoth
·
· Score: 2
That is pure basic research. It may be that for several years there isn't any "practical" gain from this research, but the same goes for quite a lot of current scientific research. It is the foundation upon practical appliances can be built.
E.g. think of electricity. It is known for several hundred years, but till the end of the 19th century nobody thought that it might have any use at all. Along came the telegraph and the first light bulb, and this viewpoint changed quite drastically.
At very low temperatures, previously unknown properties of matter can surface which nobody even thought they existed, e.g. superconductivity. It was discovered more or less by accident, and this discovery wouldn't have been possible without the low temperatures of liquid Helium.
If we were to abolish basic research, because we don't have any immediate gain from it, our technological advance would come to a slow, grinding halt. BTW when the first laser was constructed, nobody thought about its possible application in medicine. And not all lasers are equally good for everything. You wouldn't try an operation with a cd drive laser or one of the high energy systems standing in the physics building where I work!:-) Those babys are so fscking powerful, the air molecules crossing their beams fluorescate.
-- Cthulhu fhtagn!
Re:What is the point of this
by
foobarbazquux
·
· Score: 2
Cooling to really low temperatures is important for physicists to study the properties of weird things like Bose-Einstein condensates -- macroscopic amounts of stuff behaving in a quantum manner. This, as usual, helps with our understanding of quantum mechanics in specific and physics in general.
However, you may not be satisfied with such a response -- not practical enough? Cold atoms are essential for decent atomic clocks, because such a clock works by measuring the natural frequency of oscillation of the atoms. If they have heat too, they wobble due to this temperature as well as due to the natural frequency so you get a lower signal-to-noise ratio.
Atomic clocks are also very useful for physics -- some aspects of special relativity have been confirmed directly by this (twin paradox, anyone?).
Ultimately you might ask what the practical point is for this too. Those funky global positioning satellites need accuracy of this order to work out where the satellite is at any one time and hence where you are.
I've seen a lot of crap posted here about the potential uses of laser cooling. When i was doing my PhD, there was a group in the next lab doing laser cooling, so i'm almost qualified to offer an informed opinion. So, here's what laser cooling is good for:
It's good for cooling down small numbers of atoms or ions.
It works by giving each atom/ion the right amount of momentum (from a photon) to slow it to a standstill
It's useful for making bose-einstein condensates (something that's notoriously difficult)
It's useful for making very stable frequency standards (low temperature==low doppler shift==very accurate frequency standard)
It's the last of these items that is likely to prove the making of laser cooling. I don't know if it's happened yet, but there was talk of making the fundamental frequency standards (currently caesium atomic clocks) from laser cooled atoms.
I just read an article in Physics Today about new work with Bose-Einstein condensates, and I was surprised at the size (volume?) of the condensates they are making now and the research they are doing with them. It made me think that there may be applications of laser cooling that are yet to be discovered. While I heartily agree with everyone that this is not the new way to chill your Celeron I wouldn't totally rule something like this out -- hahahah okay, here's a thought. One rarely looks foolish making the most outrageous forecasts that don't come true, but your reputation takes a pretty solid hit if you say something will never be true and you are proved wrong...
--
I am quite civilized, and I should be
brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Stop linking cooling with overclocking!
by
Chuan-kai+Lin
·
· Score: 3
Just when I thought that we already have more than enough overclocking news stories (on/. and everywhere else), here comes another one. What makes it worse is that it is not even a true overclocking news story at all: first, it has nothing to do with overclocking, second, this is not news, third, there is barely a story in this one -- at least not in the way it is presented.
Let's tackle the easy one first: the "news" part. As many have already pointed out, this is hardly news for anyone who knows his way around the field of modern physics. Even if you do not major in physics or read journals each month, you are supposed to remember that three researchers, Steve Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics specifically for the development in laser cooling. I could understand that the editors at HOCP might not have the time or expertise to realize this fact (besides, they never really mentioned overclocking), and I could understand that some readers of/. might be unaware of such fact. But I really expect a lot more from our/. editors. If we need to post science stories, get somebody who knows the business instead of letting stuff posted just because some layman think it's "cool". It is unlikely that we cannot afford it, right?
Second, laser cooling has absolutely nothing to do with overclocking. This is pretty easy to understand after you see what the technology is all about. (I am not a physics major, but have read quite a lot about it a while ago when conducting some research. Still, please correct me if I am wrong.) There are a lot of ways to cooling, and most of them are based on the idea of using something colder to absorb the heat from the object we intend to cool. This works nice under normal conditions, but fails miserably when you need to cool something from 0.1K to 0.000001K -- because there is nothing cooler out there.
Microscopically, heat is represented by the vibration of molecules. The greater the vibration, the hotter it is. So if we could somehow reduce the vibration of molecules, we can effectively cool it. That is where laser comes in. When you have got hold of the vibration pattern of a molecule (or a small group of them), all you need to do is to fire a small burst of laser and use the momentum of the photons to cancel the momemtum of the atoms. So the atoms will slow down, and its temperature will reduce.
Obviously you do not want to (and cannot) do this with your processor, because it is too large, and freezing it to 0.000001K will do more harm than good. From another point of view, it is time for people to realize that there are much more forms of cooling in the field of science and engineering (cooling atoms to absolutely zero, cooling plasmas from destroying the whole research facility, cooling mirrors in high-energy laser facilities, etc.), most of which really have nothing to do with processors. It is naive to think otherwise.
Get a life, people. I mean a real one. If you do not wish to do that, maybe you should spend some of the time you saved and go study.
/. can (and should) post links to things that aren't common knowledge, even if it isn't "new". So what if cooling lasers have been in development for a decade? I've never heard about it and it was neat to read about.
If you must do one of these "that's not new" posts, at least include something of substance about the old research.
Re:Cooling ATOMS not processors
by
pmc
·
· Score: 3
Lasers are useful for cooling atoms, but they have absolutely no use when it comes to cooling processors, or anything else large enough to be visible for that matter.
Not so (I was surprised as well). At Los Alamos they have used optical refigeration to cool a lump of Ytterbium (4mm x 4mm x 7mm - so it is a visible lump) by 0.3K (not to, by). Details here. Only one laser required too. But yes, the story was clueless.
Cooling atoms, the easy way
by
Spooky+Possum
·
· Score: 2
For a more gentle introduction to laser cooling (and beyond !), see :
Don't remember where I heard that, but I think it is very true. Perhaps Slashdot needs to change it's slogan. "Slashdot: News to Rob. Stuff that matters.";)
Re:Cooling ATOMS not processors
by
stevelinton
·
· Score: 2
It's also worth noting that this is a totally different process.
Why's it belong on Slashdot NOW, though?
by
Alkaiser
·
· Score: 2
I don't understand. Did someone just now figure out that cooling lasers might have an effect on computers?
I first heard about this stuff 2 years ago, as an attachment to another story, it was on the Discovery Channel...which either has cool science shows, or really boring home improvement shows, and disgusting nature stuff.
Anyway, the guys were using the cooling lasers, along with a bunch of other duct tape/tin can & string technologies to try and find a new state of matter than Einstein had theorized about, once a substance would get really, really close to absolute zero.
The cooling lasers got the substance really, really cold by bouncing out the molecules that had extra energy, and with a bunch of really complex thrown together hacks, they found a new state of matter, which they called Bowes/Einstein Condensate. (I'm not sure on the spelling of that, but I kind of object to naming a state of matter after yourself. It'd be like calling "gas" the "Dalton State" or something.) The technoloy for this is really old, and therefore may be ready for public use...not. Superconductivity changing any of your daily lives yet? Not mine. I'm still in a subconductive world, baby. A lot of these col technologies just end up not having practical, cost effective uses, and remain just cool sound-bites on a website like this, or on the Discovery Channel. The cost of putting cooling lasers in my computer is still going to be far more expensive than me buying a portable icebox and sticking my computer inside of that for at least the next 2 decades.
On top of that, The Man wants to do everything possible to keep lasers out of the hands of the public. Which is why we can only get those really weenie 3 volt 600 nm laser pointers. The government's just afraid in general of us doing stuff like, getting a bunch of cooling lasers and our Playstation 2s, and taking over Canada or something.
-- Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Slashdot Mirror
Cooling of energetic ion beams to high phase-space densities represents a challenging issue with great importance for present an future experiments performed at storage rings. The dynamics of ultracold and dense particle beams is a widely unexplored research field dealing with interesting new, collective beam phenomena. Laser cooling, which was introduced to ion storage rings in the early '90s, turns out to be a very efficient method for beam cooling towards high phase-space densities [1,2]. The resonant light pressure foce acting on the ions provides an extremely strong damping force resulting in very low beam temperatures. At these low temperatures, the plasma parameter G, defined as the ratio of the Coulomb potential energy between nearest neighbor ions to the thermal kinetic energy per ion becomes larger than one already at moderate densities. For a one component plasma with G>1, a phase transition into a Coulomb ordered state takes place. An ion crystal circulating in a storage ring at great speed uniquely combines high energy beam physics with the physics of strongly coupled plasmas[3]. The setup of the experiment is described here.
In a storage ring, only the longitudinal degree of freedom can be directly cooled very efficiently. However, we could demonstrate tranverse beam cooling by a coupling through Intra beam Coulomb scattering [4]. In addition, we have introduced a novel method for indirect transverse cooling based on a single-particle interaction of ions with the laser light (dispersive cooling).
In the course of the last year, we have made important progress in laser cooling towards crystalline beams which has led us to new interesting results. The observations are consistent with the formation of a crystalline ion beam:
You mean you don't already know?!?
Think people!!!
Here we can kill two very important computer problems with one proverbial stone! And even reap a nifty side effect as well!
- Problem one: The heat problem. Computers have it, and this represents an alternative to other methods. It has a few definate advantages over traditional heat sinks.
- Problem two: Just think how cool the inside of your computer could look with some of these babies installed! Flashing lights! Cool lasers! You might even be able to get them to do cool scanline effects! You might even end up leaving your case off, to both facilitate air flow, and to enjoy the cool techo-ness of the inside of your computer! Get a fog machine, and your heat sink could probably match anything you see at a concert or other "professional" laser show!
- Nifty side effect: Lasers are cool! They are one of those items which for some reason, are simply undeniably cool. (Other examples include lightsabers, NINJAs, and walls covered entirely by TV screens and flashing LEDs.) So if you put something that cool in your computer, then your computer will become slightly cooler by proximity, and you, as the owner of the now coolness-enhanced machine will find yourself reaping the benifits of coolness as well!
And THAT's what the point is!That is pure basic research. It may be that for several years there isn't any "practical" gain from this research, but the same goes for quite a lot of current scientific research. It is the foundation upon practical appliances can be built.
E.g. think of electricity. It is known for several hundred years, but till the end of the 19th century nobody thought that it might have any use at all. Along came the telegraph and the first light bulb, and this viewpoint changed quite drastically.
At very low temperatures, previously unknown properties of matter can surface which nobody even thought they existed, e.g. superconductivity. It was discovered more or less by accident, and this discovery wouldn't have been possible without the low temperatures of liquid Helium.
If we were to abolish basic research, because we don't have any immediate gain from it, our technological advance would come to a slow, grinding halt. BTW when the first laser was constructed, nobody thought about its possible application in medicine. And not all lasers are equally good for everything. You wouldn't try an operation with a cd drive laser or one of the high energy systems standing in the physics building where I work! :-) Those babys are so fscking powerful, the air molecules crossing their beams fluorescate.
Cthulhu fhtagn!
Cooling to really low temperatures is important for physicists to study the properties of weird things like Bose-Einstein condensates -- macroscopic amounts of stuff behaving in a quantum manner. This, as usual, helps with our understanding of quantum mechanics in specific and physics in general.
However, you may not be satisfied with such a response -- not practical enough? Cold atoms are essential for decent atomic clocks, because such a clock works by measuring the natural frequency of oscillation of the atoms. If they have heat too, they wobble due to this temperature as well as due to the natural frequency so you get a lower signal-to-noise ratio.
Atomic clocks are also very useful for physics -- some aspects of special relativity have been confirmed directly by this (twin paradox, anyone?).
Ultimately you might ask what the practical point is for this too. Those funky global positioning satellites need accuracy of this order to work out where the satellite is at any one time and hence where you are.
It's the last of these items that is likely to prove the making of laser cooling. I don't know if it's happened yet, but there was talk of making the fundamental frequency standards (currently caesium atomic clocks) from laser cooled atoms.
Just when I thought that we already have more than enough overclocking news stories (on /. and everywhere else), here comes another one. What makes it worse is that it is not even a true overclocking news story at all: first, it has nothing to do with overclocking, second, this is not news, third, there is barely a story in this one -- at least not in the way it is presented.
Let's tackle the easy one first: the "news" part. As many have already pointed out, this is hardly news for anyone who knows his way around the field of modern physics. Even if you do not major in physics or read journals each month, you are supposed to remember that three researchers, Steve Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics specifically for the development in laser cooling. I could understand that the editors at HOCP might not have the time or expertise to realize this fact (besides, they never really mentioned overclocking), and I could understand that some readers of /. might be unaware of such fact. But I really expect a lot more from our /. editors. If we need to post science stories, get somebody who knows the business instead of letting stuff posted just because some layman think it's "cool". It is unlikely that we cannot afford it, right?
Second, laser cooling has absolutely nothing to do with overclocking. This is pretty easy to understand after you see what the technology is all about. (I am not a physics major, but have read quite a lot about it a while ago when conducting some research. Still, please correct me if I am wrong.) There are a lot of ways to cooling, and most of them are based on the idea of using something colder to absorb the heat from the object we intend to cool. This works nice under normal conditions, but fails miserably when you need to cool something from 0.1K to 0.000001K -- because there is nothing cooler out there.
Microscopically, heat is represented by the vibration of molecules. The greater the vibration, the hotter it is. So if we could somehow reduce the vibration of molecules, we can effectively cool it. That is where laser comes in. When you have got hold of the vibration pattern of a molecule (or a small group of them), all you need to do is to fire a small burst of laser and use the momentum of the photons to cancel the momemtum of the atoms. So the atoms will slow down, and its temperature will reduce.
Obviously you do not want to (and cannot) do this with your processor, because it is too large, and freezing it to 0.000001K will do more harm than good. From another point of view, it is time for people to realize that there are much more forms of cooling in the field of science and engineering (cooling atoms to absolutely zero, cooling plasmas from destroying the whole research facility, cooling mirrors in high-energy laser facilities, etc.), most of which really have nothing to do with processors. It is naive to think otherwise.
Get a life, people. I mean a real one. If you do not wish to do that, maybe you should spend some of the time you saved and go study.
/. can (and should) post links to things that aren't common knowledge, even if it isn't "new". So what if cooling lasers have been in development for a decade? I've never heard about it and it was neat to read about.
If you must do one of these "that's not new" posts, at least include something of substance about the old research.
Not so (I was surprised as well). At Los Alamos they have used optical refigeration to cool a lump of Ytterbium (4mm x 4mm x 7mm - so it is a visible lump) by 0.3K (not to, by). Details here. Only one laser required too. But yes, the story was clueless.
Experimental Aspects of BEC
This is actually a gratuitous plug for my groups homepage, but its worth a look.
News is just the history you don't already know.
;)
Don't remember where I heard that, but I think it is very true. Perhaps Slashdot needs to change it's slogan. "Slashdot: News to Rob. Stuff that matters."
It's also worth noting that this is a totally different process.
I don't understand. Did someone just now figure out that cooling lasers might have an effect on computers?
I first heard about this stuff 2 years ago, as an attachment to another story, it was on the Discovery Channel...which either has cool science shows, or really boring home improvement shows, and disgusting nature stuff.
Anyway, the guys were using the cooling lasers, along with a bunch of other duct tape/tin can & string technologies to try and find a new state of matter than Einstein had theorized about, once a substance would get really, really close to absolute zero.
The cooling lasers got the substance really, really cold by bouncing out the molecules that had extra energy, and with a bunch of really complex thrown together hacks, they found a new state of matter, which they called Bowes/Einstein Condensate. (I'm not sure on the spelling of that, but I kind of object to naming a state of matter after yourself. It'd be like calling "gas" the "Dalton State" or something.) The technoloy for this is really old, and therefore may be ready for public use...not. Superconductivity changing any of your daily lives yet? Not mine. I'm still in a subconductive world, baby. A lot of these col technologies just end up not having practical, cost effective uses, and remain just cool sound-bites on a website like this, or on the Discovery Channel. The cost of putting cooling lasers in my computer is still going to be far more expensive than me buying a portable icebox and sticking my computer inside of that for at least the next 2 decades.
On top of that, The Man wants to do everything possible to keep lasers out of the hands of the public. Which is why we can only get those really weenie 3 volt 600 nm laser pointers. The government's just afraid in general of us doing stuff like, getting a bunch of cooling lasers and our Playstation 2s, and taking over Canada or something.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga