Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scientists Using Lasers To Cool Molecules

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the my-fridge-is-powered-by-fire dept.

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."

2 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Who the hell... by ameline · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who the hell uses Fahrenheit for anything remotely connected to science? I can understand translating 0K to -273.15C, then 1K is -272.15C -- but how meaningful to anyone is -459.67F?

    --
    Ian Ameline
  2. Re:Well, that's clueless for you by maxwell+demon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If there is anything that lasers are not, it's white.

    Yes, Lasers are white - in the QCD sense (photons don't carry color charge) :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.