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What 'Negative Temperature' Really Means
On Friday we discussed news of researchers getting a quantum gas to go below absolute zero. There was confusion about exactly what that meant, and several commenters pointed out that negative temperatures have been achieved before. Now, Rutgers physics grad student Aatish Bhatia has written a comprehensible post for the layman about how negative temperatures work, and why they're not actually "colder" than absolute zero. Quoting:
"...you first need to engineer a system that has an upper limit to its energy. This is a very rare thing – normal, everyday stuff that we interact with has kinetic energy of motion, and there is no upper bound to how much kinetic energy it can have. Systems with an upper bound in energy don’t want to be in that highest energy state. ...these systems have low entropy in (i.e. low probability of being in) their high energy state. You have to experimentally ‘trick’ the system into getting here. This was first done in an ingenious experiment by Purcell and Pound in 1951, where they managed to trick the spins of nuclei in a crystal of Lithium Fluoride into entering just such an unlikely high energy state. In that experiment, they maintained a negative temperature for a few minutes. Since then, negative temperatures have been realized in many experiments, and most recently established in a completely different realm, of ultracold atoms of a quantum gas trapped in a laser."
All quantum means is that energy can only have specific values. Imagine a stereo with a volume knob that clicks between values, ie it can be 1, 2, 3, n, but cannot be anything inbetween those numbers. Now you have a quantum volume knob.
Temperature is a statistical property of matter that only exists once we consider things as a continuum. At scales where we consider quantum mechanics, a molecule has energies (kinetic, rotational, vibrational, electrical, etc) which can only take on specific values (quantized) and these values are specific to the atom/molecule to some degree (atom makeup, radiative properties, etc).
That probably doesnt help wtih the sub-0 part of the article, but perhaps it will help with the quantum part.
In the USA, it means its really, really cold, you'll have to dress well, including good gloves and hat. If there is any wind you'll wand to cover your face too.
and the air is very dry, inside, getting a humidifier is a good idea.. If your car or truck has been parked outside for a while you would need to start it and have it warm up for 10 minutes before driving off.
In the rest of the world its cold but bearable, since its just below freezing sidewalks may be slippery.
I majored in Physics and am currently in grad school and I have no problem with that wording. In fact we Physicist often anthropomorphize when talking amongst ourselves, so what the hell is your problem? Grow up and realize that language is simply a tool used to convey ideas, no one with half a brain reads that statement and actually thinks the particles in the system have needs or desires. Instead they will realize by the wording and context that the particle(s) are simply less likely to be in the higher energy states for reasons that the author doesn't want to go into. If you disagree you're wrong.
Mine's even better, it goes to -1...
I don't use it anymore after I damaged physical reality on its first use.
Stop thinking of temperature as the energy of a system, but think of it as the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution of energy of the system. Certain temperature - certain shaped distribution. Bung in a temperature value, get out a distribution shape. Now, muck with the energy distribution such that the number input to the Maxwell–Boltzmann function to get that shape is negative. There you go, negative "temperature" while there's still energy in the system.
layman
n.
A man who gets laid. Also known as a non-Slashdotter.
I thought about explaining it, and i will do so *without* mentioning the Dalai Lama.
The Situation is very simple: The definition of Temperature you learned in school, namely that it is only related to the average energy of many equal systems *is right*, but only for *classical systems*.
What does it mean?
If i have a classical gas, e.g. air at room temperature and i have to input to it, i can add this energy in whichever distribution i want. Easy to do that, no matter at which temperature we are.
No lets consider a quantum gas (to be complete: a quantum gas and not consiting of harmonic oscillators), e.g. electrons spins which are aligned to a magnetic field. Each of the electron can either have an Energy of -1/2E or +1/2E, where E depends on the electron spin and the magnetig field, but is constant. This means that if i have N electrons, we wont be able to input more energy than N * E into the system. Moreover if only a single electron in not in the high-energy state, we have to flip exactly this electron to get the system into its highest energy state. That may be pretty hard, statistically speaking.
So now imagine a quantum gas somehow statistically exchanging energy with a classical gas. That means, in our case, to bring the quantum gas to the state of Total energy = N*E (from the state of (N-1)*E) a high energy gas molecule would have the hit the very last of the low-ebergy electrons. If the high-energy molecules bounce from the electron in the excited state, then nothing will happen.
It is intuitive that, even if the two gases are in contact, the avergae energy between the systems will *not* be the same, just because its unlikely to flip *all* or *nearly all*.
The fromal version if this consideration is the textbook definition of the Temperature as a property in statistical physics, which is T=dE/dS, where E is the total energy and S is the Entropy (yes, the very same one as in computational science).
In the case of the two-level systems we find (let n be the numebr of systems in exited state)
S is proportional to -(n*log(n/N) + (N-n)*log((N-n)/n))
E is proprotioanl to n
That means that the sign of the temperature changes, as soon as more systems are excited than not.
Actually, it's not to hard to intuitively understand negative temperature if you think of it as something hotter than the hottest possible temperature. Classically, that isn't possible, but then you need a bit of quantum weirdness.
In a typical system of normal temperature particles of occupy various quantum energy levels available to them. In thermal equilibrium, statistically, lower energy levels tend to get occupied first and higher energy levels have fewer particles. If somehow you can create a stable system where higher energy states are occupied, but by some quirk (of quantum mechanics), lower ones are not, it turns out that is what a negative temperature system is.
As it turns temporarily creating a system where the higher energy levels are occupied before the lower ones is something that people do all the time to create a pumped laser. But lasers aren't designed to be a stable system (you eventually want the higher energy state to emit light/photons and fall to the lower energy state), so although the population of the energy states are inverted (more in the upper energy states), it's not stable, so it's generally not accurate to call this a negative temperature system.
The reason the "sign" of the temperature is negative is just a problem with the definition of temperature. For most defintions of temperature, if you add energy, you increase entropy, so temperature is a measure of how these relate to each other (the slope). If somehow when you add energy to your system, you decrease entropy of your system (e.g, you pack the upper energy states even tighter reducing entropy instead of just letting particles in all energy states into statistically higher energy states), the slope is negative.