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."
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.
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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.