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Researchers Use Lasers For Cooling
MatthewVD writes "Infrared cameras on satellites and night vision goggles could soon use lasers to cool their components. According to the study published in Nature, researchers in Singapore were able to cool the semiconductor cadmium sulfide from 62 degrees fahrenheit to -9 degrees by focusing a green laser on it and making it fluoresce and lose energy as light. Since they require neither gas nor moving parts, they can be more compact, free from vibration and not prone to mechanical failure."
Been saying lasers are cool for ages, but do they listen to me? Nooo...
It would freeze the water around the shark.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The scientists used SI units all the way through in their paper (Kelvin for temperature), and they would have been laughed out of court and certainly not published in Nature if they'd done otherwise.
Why does Slashdot even accept a submission in Fahrenheit when the subject is science? Most nerds understand SI units, and most of the planet is metric. How about trying to be a bit educational for the few that don't? Quote both if you're trying to be helpful, with the SI units as primary for science reporting and imperial equivalents only in brackets.
Another laser, duh.
It's lasers all the way down.
Sorry about hijacking this thread, but nobody seems to have posted the temperatures in a proper scale yet, so here we go:
No, this is different. What you describe is called Doppler cooling and is basically "slowing down" the atoms/ions.
TFA, on the other hand, talks about using a laser to cause fluorescence in the material. It's a completely different principle.
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