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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."
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?
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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).
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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.
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.
Well, it does say in the article that a major goal is the detection of so-called gravity waves. As far as I know, there's no irrefutable evidence that gravity doesn't propagate faster than lightspeed - that, in fact, it's speed might very well be unbounded. I can bet you that once we have a gravity wave emitter that the next step will be a coherent gravity wave emitter i.e. a gravitational laser.
Actually, I thought it was measured in Kelvin?
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.
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
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http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/lascool1
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Only if they can get lasers to stop burning 10x the amount of energy that you put in to get it to fire.
(I know that some are more efficient than others, but you all know there's no free lunch)
I'd be willing to bet that the massive amount of power required to cool all the air in your house would make you bankrupt in less than a year(and really piss off your power company).
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?
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.
"Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light..." I believe Victor Fries would be proud.
I've heard that eating a mirror was bad luck.
Nothing came up on Snopes.com, so it must be true...
When will we see this technique used to cool the CPUs in gaming machines?
"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, who's the coolest one o-- AAAAAAAH! MY EYES!
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.
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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.
Tell that to my cousin Tommy, the mooch.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You realize that star trek reference (the star trek enterprise episode title) is itself a reference to Corinthians in the new testament, right? And that it's not the only time star trek has referenced it... another translation comes out not as "in a mirror darkly" but "through a glass, darkly", for the same passage, which Picard says in Star Trek Nemesis.
Plus many books have used the same reference too.... but now I'm rambling.
Similarly, when many ordinary metals are cooled down they become superconducting (conduct electricity without any resistance), or liquid Helium becomes superfluid (can flow outside the open container in which it was stored at higher temperatures). The latter two phenomena are essentially quantum-mechanical, and they tell us to expect new phenomena/states of matter sitting at low temperatures. That's one of the reasons why low temperatures are interesting. If so, would this doom the earth to become a black hole, or do something similar? Many think the main problem with Earth is about its warming up, not cooling down...