Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Using Lasers To Cool Molecules
An anonymous reader writes "Ever since audiences heard Goldfinger utter the famous line, 'No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die,' as a laser beam inched its way toward James Bond and threatened to cut him in half, lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy capable of burning through anything in their path. Now a team of Yale physicists has used lasers for a completely different purpose, employing them to cool molecules down to temperatures near absolute zero, about -460 degrees Fahrenheit. Their new method for laser cooling, described in the online edition of the journal Nature, is a significant step toward the ultimate goal of using individual molecules as information bits in quantum computing."
Shooting things with laser until they stop moving cools them? I guess its for more than cooking now.
When I shot the neighbor's cat, with my CO2 laser, until it stopped moving, it cooled down. It dropped from 101.5 degrees F, to about 63 degrees F (ambient temperature at the coolest part of that night) . It took several hours, but it cooled down.
[disclaimer] The above statement was purely jest. I have never shot anything with a laser, and have never intentionally harmed an animal. Any agency that is sniffing my packets will not find the stench of wrongdoing here. Just the stench of a bad joke.
No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to yell like a little girl while I am freezing your balls!
You can't handle the truth.
Wrong? It's not true that the general Bond-watching audience thinks of lasers as being white hot?
It's pretty obvious: The atoms are stirred, not shaken.
OK.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain