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Researchers Chill Mirror to Near Absolute Zero
An anonymous reader writes "Physicists have managed to cool a dime-sized mirror to within one degree of absolute zero. This is the lowest laser-induced freeze yet achieved with a visible object. Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light at a specific frequency that exactly matches an atom's motions."
I actually thought of making a instant refrigerator like that once, like a microwave speed but a freezer. My goals where of course shot down when I did research into how the limitations(thing to work really have to me microscopic), as well as the Microsoft had already patented it. Go figure.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Could they make a cheaper version of this system to build more efficient air-conditioners?
"sharks with frickin' laser" posts...
Cool....
Happy Days!
i'm still waiting for someone to chill something to absolute zero, and it disapears....
I was nearly first post!
A mirror that cold would totally fog up, eh? So you couldn't use it for shaving.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Science *is* cool. Sometimes literally!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Overclocking!
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
What's the significance of chilling a dime-sized mirror, vs chilling a dime?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Does it make good ice cream?
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
This should answer the age old question, if a mirror at absolute zero breaks, do you have bad luck?
could someone explain what the significance of this is?
Perhaps we could reflect on it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You could try reading the first sentence of the article.
the surface has to be highly reflective for this to work. If it absorbed the photons, then it's temperature would increase, and if it was transparent the photons wouldn't interact with the material very much, and thus would not be able to cool it.
It confirms our understanding of light and matter and how they interact. You would think that shining light (energy) on something would warm it up. If it cools it down, something strange is going on.
In a broader sense, it means that we can manipulate matter and energy in ways nobody imagined 100 years ago (well, except for Einstein).
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
What do they expect that the mirror will do once it is only subject to quantum effects? Will it explode? That would be cool.
... otherwise I can go to the lab tomorrow and drop a whopping *palm-sized* mirrow in a dewar of liquid He to get within a factor of 4 to their achievement! And then. if keep being nice to other guys around, I can sneak a dime-sized object to cool to, like, some mK... :)
Paul B.
> "Physicists have managed to cool a dime-sized mirror to within one degree of absolute zero. This is the lowest laser-induced freeze yet achieved with a visible object. Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light at a specific frequency that exactly matches an atom's motions."
So you've met my ex, then?
IANAP, so I figured this was some sort of breakthrough. As it turns out:
1. Others have gotten much, much closer to 0 K using atoms and laser cooling.
2. Others have gotten much, much closer to 0 K using solid objects and different cooling methods.
3. Their method has the potential of getting closer to 0 K.
So, even if it is not a breakthrough it is still impressive.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
The real world application of this will be truly shown when they find the exact frequency on beer.
Then, gaze upon its brilliance.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
is that one degree fahrenheit or one degree celsius?
Thermal motion of mirrors are a limiting factor in high precision experiments. This allows those fluctuations to be reduced, allowing cool physics.
Who TF is "Hillery?"
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
could someone explain what the significance of this is?
Perhaps we could reflect on it.
Absolutely... to a degree.
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It's already pretty cool. HAHAHAHA I slay me.
My exwife could do that with just a glance. It may not have been one degree over Absolute Zero but it sure felt that way.
You know, that chick with the snuke up her sniz.
Well, an experiment was performed near absolutely zero that stopped light...
"In a Mirror, Darkly..."
Now give some "+5 Funny" or "+5 Informal", 'cause my karma is bad.
Oh, you mean Hilldog.
You want to get to absolute zero, go see my first wife
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Hopefully we can all see the light.
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
So for visible objects, there are non more cold? And it's not going to absolute zero. It's going to absolute one. It's one higher.
What did they see in the mirror?
...everyone looks like The Fonz.
Aaaaay.
Someone snuck a snuke up her snizz?
Now we would all be a lot more impressed if they cooled a glass of Guinness down to the requisite 5 degrees Celsius.
A functional laser operated beer cooler... now that would be a patent i wouldn't complain about.
The JILA group at UC Boulder does lots of work on laser cooling and trapping (the Weimann/Ketterle/Cornell group got the 2001 Nobel Prize for generating BEC by laser cooling). They have a neat java applet demonstrating the effect
. html
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/lascool1
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
A couple of people made posts that got my brain ticking.. Someone mentioned that this confirms quantum theory in that adding light energy reduces the temperature, thereby reducing the energy of the system. In response, someone mentioned it was like noise cancellation. The problem I see with this analogy, and the idea of the experiment in general is that while I can see similarities, when we talk about noise cancellation, no energy is lost. It is still there, even though destructive interference cancels the noise where the waves overlap. The sound waves will continue to travel, and if they leave the area where they are destructively influenced, the noise will start back up. With the photons reducing temperature situation, where is the energy going? We start with high speed atoms and light, and end with low speed atoms and no light; isn't the energy being destroyed? I am not very up on my quantum mechanics, but can see two possibilities: either energy isn't really conserved under quantum mechanics, or the atom is rereleasing a photon after the initial photon hits it and slows it down. Perhaps neither is right, but could someone please explain the apparent lack of conservation of energy here?
I know I'm new here because I'm reading the articles, but the opening and closing paragraphs of the article directly answers your question: If you want to really see quantum mechanics in action, you've got to turn the temperature down so low that even atoms stop moving. Physicists have come close to achieving this "absolute zero" state by using precision-tuned lasers, but the technique has only allowed researchers to freeze small groups of atoms at a time. Now members of an international team say they have managed to cool a dime-sized mirror to within one degree of absolute zero, the lowest laser-induced freeze yet achieved with a visible object. [...] If the effort is successful, Mavalvala says, it will also lead to much more sensitive instruments for LIGO, which is attempting to detect elusive phenomena called gravity waves. Predicted by Einstein but not yet observed, the waves are thought to be emitted by the most violent events in the universe, such as black hole collisions.
It has many applications in astronomy. During the winter, the only expedition to climb to the top of the Mauna Kea are to fill the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium tanks of those huge telescopes. We don't realize it but getting pretty picture in IR requires that you more of less shut down the black body radiation of your optics. With liquid helium they cool the CCDs to 4.5 Kelvin. They use so much of the stuff that they need to fill the tanks every other week. I admit that I have no idea how big is the said tank but laser cooling would open the way to mostly unattended (think orbital) telescopes for a much broader part of the spectrum. At the moment we send IR orbital scopes with big tanks of liquid helium which is dead lift weight that could be used for larger optics and we drop the scopes in the ocean when they run out of the stuff. Spitzer, unlike Hubble, will be useless soon and will not be able to perform observations even if all the mechanical and electronics are still in top condition. If you ever visit the Mauna Kea, notice the frost patches inside the observatory. It's kind of cold up there but the best experience is inside the observatory: it's freezing, everyone is dizzy after climbing the stair (the air is really thin) and you see all those big pipes with cryo-steam. It feels like the visit to the cryo chamber in Akira.
... is that what they serve at AA meetings?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
"Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light..." I believe Victor Fries would be proud.
The problem here is that an incoherent mass has been
convinced that it is not only coherent energy, but 180deg out of phase
with a coherent light source (almost). Seems to me that QM
might even have a problem or two with this.
Using LASER cooling to bring a macroscopic object o 0.8K is pretty darn neat. But cooling big things in general to sub-Kelvin temperatures is not that unusual (the article only gives a nod to this idea). For example, in our bolometry experiment, we cool 40 kg of TeO2 crystals down to just 10 milliKelvin using an ancient Oxford (brand) dilution refrigerator.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
When will we see this technique used to cool the CPUs in gaming machines?
If the mirror was cooled lower still it supposedly would exhibit quantum effects, TFA says. Would this mean the mirror could interfere with itself, like in the single photon double slit experiment? How could this create more sensitive mirrors for the LIGO?
Nice, but why is the Scientist character a white male, and the interviewer a dark-skinned female? For that matter, why is the scientist blond? A little snooping around the web shows that Weimann and Cornell have dark hair, and Ketterle HAD dark hair (now it's gray).
"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, who's the coolest one o-- AAAAAAAH! MY EYES!
does it freeze kernels too?
There must be some error in TFA. Looks like it was written by someone with little understanding. To cool a 1g item under 1K is trivial. You can buy coolers that can keep large volumes way down in the mK range. Commercial literature give numbers like 1mW cooling at 35mK.
TFA says that the purpose of cooling was to "...cancel the natural forces entirely, so quantum forces apply exclusively."
That is of course incorrect. Quantum mechanics *are* the natural forces(,excluding gravity?), and cooling is often used to bring matter to the ground state or similar, so quantum effects take on macroscopic and often more observable (and intriguing) properties.
If there is a real breakthrough here, does anyone have the original scientific reference?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
"Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light at a specific frequency that exactly matches an atom's motions."
I may be wrong on this, as I'm just an undergrad physics major, but in my experience laser cooling involves detuning a laser slightly below some atomic transition frequency, and counterpropagating the same beam back. What happens is as a laser moves quickly in the direction of the beam, it observes the laser's frequency to be higher due to the Doppler shift, and suddenly this laser that was not resonating with the atoms comes into resonance, and the atom starts absorbing photons, which have momentum. This knocks the atom back such that it can't move quickly in the direction of the laser. Often this is done with six beams along three orthogonal axes so that you cool the atoms in all directions.
I have discovered a truly marvelous
.. thats nothing, I knew a girl that was colder that that
You missed the point. The rest of the world might be doing this regularly, but this is HAPPENING IN AMERICA. And some of the scientists on the team are AMERICAN.
This means it's really happening, and that this is the breakthrough everyone has been looking for. It proves the the US still ROCKS, and that foreigners can't compete with our slick science - so we're still a GREAT POWER.
Things that happen in Europe or Asia just don't count. Or if they do, it's because an AMERICAN (probably living in a log cabin in 1910) had the idea first.
If you don't believe me, I have many quotes from Hollywood films to PROVE that AMERICA is best, cleverest, and has invented everything in the world!
'temperature' denotes how agitated the molecules are in the matter. the hotter they get the more they knock around with each other. this in turn leads to them dislodging electrons from each other and these electrons float around until they find a slot (of another atom that had an electron knocked off) and fall back into the atom. hence, these floating electrons setup random electric currents.
any electric conductor that is not at absolute zero will introduce these random variations in a flowing signal. this is simply what we call as noise. hence, the higher the temperature, the noisier it gets inside an electronic component.
if you have a very weak signal (like a distant star's light), having a sensor operating at a low tempurature can mean the difference between seeing it and not seeing it at all.
remember, the noise will go down proportionate to the absolute tempurature. so moving from my city (hyderabad, 40 centigrade in the shade today) to stockholm will not make much of a difference. but moving down to single digit kelvin will be a huge force multiplier.
The purpose of all philosophers was to impress women
Scientists can use lasers to cool atoms/crystals/mirrors to near absolute zero, does that mean: a) really god-damn-cold-fusion is possible, or b) by increasing the power of the lasers, hot-fusion may occur?. Sorry, but I'm waiting for someone (less drunk and more eloquent than I) to comment on the definition of temperature, the scales (K/F/C), and what this experiment could lead to.
Cool.
Frog blast the vent core.
Thank you so much for providing this. Flv to avi
did the reflection froze or not?
I'm a physicist. I even have a very small bit of experience with low-temperature work (as an undergrad, I once used a dilution refrigerator to get a macroscopic object down to about 0.5 K, or half a degree above absolute zero). I'm now a theorist, working (in theory) with laser-cooled cold atoms, among other things. Despite all this, I have no clue what the significance is.
Lower temperatures are reachable with conventional techniques (such as dilution refrigerators). TFA suggests that the technique can eventually be used to achieve even lower temperatures, which they can use this to probe how quantum mechanics works with macroscopic objects. A good friend of mine is working on developing measures for characterizing macroscopic superpositions (so-called "cat states"), and I've never heard him mention ultra-cold mirrors as a candidate system; they usually think about things like Josephson junctions, BECs in double-well potentials, or the like.
If you'll forgive the pun, this is a very cool experiment, but it seems like a technique looking for an application. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea--the same was true of the laser once upon a time, but fortunately Charlie Townes et al didn't give up on it.
Looking at yourself in a cold mirror would logically make you look cooler.
.. goes up to eleven
...scientists plan to breathe on the mirror, and write their name in the condensation.
There must be some error in TFA. Looks like it was written by someone with little understanding. To cool a 1g item under 1K is trivial. You can buy coolers that can keep large volumes way down in the mK range. Commercial literature give numbers like 1mW cooling at 35mK.
It looks like you read a little too quickly. They didn't use a cooler, they used lasers. This is the first time laser cooling has ever been successfully used to bring a macroscopic object under 1K.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Perhaps you knew that supercooled matter has a tendency to form one giant particle (Bosones and Fermions). What do we know about these fused matter states? Actually very little, because supercooling things is hard.
Let's see... a mirror is used in optics, something chilled to near-zero isn't moving(atoms are near motion-less), putting those two together means my pr0n is going to be that much crisper.
Or maybe someone would like to use the demonstrated cooling effect to chill some hardware? Maybe superconductors without having to use liquid nitrogen?
Sometimes just seeing what you can do is enough of a reason. "Because it is there"
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
their laser goes up to 11, which might have allowed them to get below 1 degree!
The article fails to mention that the cooling was in one dimension only, in the direction of the laser, so the mirror would not even feel cryogenically cold if you touched it. The atoms are frozen in one dimension but are free to move in the other dimensions.
I don't have a reference at the moment nor the time to dig it up, but I am fairly sure this is the case.
I wonder if this method could be potentially useful for refrigeration. Attach a laser and a mirror to anything you want to cool, and it could act like a heat sink.
Maybe if the heat produced by the laser is less than the amount of cooling that it results in, it would be different than any kind of current refrigeration, where the net effect is always more heat. If this were possible, then refrigeration could happen in an enclosed space. Though somehow I think this proposition violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I make it that you'd have more than 6,500,000,000 dollars. Unless you're counting all possible potential brains that I could have, in which case the sum would be astronomical.
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Dude, it totally validates Duke Nuke 'em's freeze ray.
In the 21st century, the evolution of ice beer continued unabated...
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you want to really see quantum mechanics in action, you've got to turn the temperature down so low that even atoms stop moving. Hmm... Nope. No explanation as to why they're using a dime sized mirror at all. You could just as easily* chill a cube of carbon, the plastic plug from the end of a ball point pen, or a leftover piece of cheese from last night's pizza. Perhaps the scientists had an old dental mirror lying around. Who knows? Whatever the reason, it certainly isn't explained in the first sentence.
* I have no idea how easy or hard it would be to chill these items vs chilling a mirror.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
laser air conditioner for my flying car?
---
I just woke up, go easy on me will ya?
From what I understand about absolute zero, there is no energy in the system, including the energy required to keep electrons in orbit around the nucleus of an atom. Therefore, the atoms would collapse in on themselves, creating an extremely dense substance. Am I right in thinking this would happen? If so, would this doom the earth to become a black hole, or do something similar?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
My refrigerator repair man was explaining to me in a very pedantic way that a refrigerator doesn't make cold, but rather it moves heat out of the inside and pushes it to the outside. This is the conservation of energy.
If a laser can counter the speed of atoms, thus creating an object at near absolute zero, couldn't this create a cold environment without creating equal heat outside the environment? Am I misunderstanding the experiment or are they creating cold without removing heat?
The applications of this are remarkable. Cooling systems that don't require heat dissipation, air conditioners without access to the outside. Engines can be cooled without radiators.
So what am I missing here, because this sounds remarkable to me.
Eh, its just a cool mirror, no big deal.
crap.
could someone explain what the significance of this is?
Perhaps we could reflect on it.
Absolutely... to a degree.
Reflection to that degree requires an unclouded mind, so chill.
You can't handle the truth.
We use an ADR (Adiabatic Degmagnetization Refrigerator) to cool sensors in one of our labs and regularly go below 50 milikelvin (our sensors can't measure below 50 milikelvin).
o n
50 milikelvin is 0.050 degrees C above absolute zero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigerati
I have always wanted the reverse of a Microwave, something that can rapidly cool food/drink, I wonder if it is possible with this technology?
Seems limited to things that are made up primarily of the same types of atoms?
I wonder if you could do this with sound waves, (or with this tech) kind of like how noise cancelling tech works, but tuned to the water in food/drink, if you specifically shot the slight or sound waves at the frequency of water (OR H or O atoms instead) molecules to steady them it would theoretically cool any organic substance...right?
Just a nitpick, but the UCs are in California (University of California) and U of Colorado is called CU. So it's CU-Boulder.
Sony ha
PS: You can look for "Penrose bomb", or, for instance: The Meaning of the Interaction-Free Measurements
is the question about why it's a dime sized mirror?
"Seeing quantum mechanics in action" seems a reasonable answer to "does this tell us anything interesting about the universe?".
I'm terribly sorry I didn't ask your completely unrelated question to you satisfaction. My mind reading skills are a bit below par I guess.
point to me where ... is the question about why it's a dime sized mirror?
In the word "this". Since the original post was a direct child of the story "Researchers Chill Mirror to Near Absolute Zero" (which later describes the mirror as dime sized), I assumed that the "this" in the question "could someone explain what the significance of this is" referred to chilling a mirror. Or to put it another way, I took the first question of the post to mean "could someone explain what the significance of chilling a mirror, as opposed to any of the other things that are routinely chilled to near absolute zero, is?". In other words "Why a mirror?"
Of course, in a post morning coffee world, I can see that I was projecting my own question into the post, and that you were responding to the second question. I humbly apologize for the confusion, and for any offense I may have caused.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Whereas I was replying to what I was replying to, not the entire chain of posts.
The answer to your question is in the fourth last sentence of the article, far to far down for slashdot.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Pickup trucks!
It's been a long time.
I've heard of interaction-free measurements and the Penrose bomb before (although I think it was given another name), but I'm not immediately seeing how this is relevant. Care to elaborate? Is it necessary to perform the experiment?