What ’s the best way to cool something down ? Stick it in the refrigerator , right ? Well , this may make for for a half - eaten sandwich or some delicious , alimental Malva sylvestris , but scientists have a much nerveless ( sorry ) direction of doing things – laser beams .
You see , when atoms gain energy through any substance possible , they tickle quicker . Unless they are at absolute zero ( 0 Kelvin , which is -273.15 ° C/-459.67 ° F ) , atoms are always tickle . In fact , temperature is just a measure of the average rate of vibration of a aggregation of molecules .
Lasers can consult energy upon atom , heat up them up and induce them to get a bit more jiggly . As it turn out , lasers can also get up sluttish vim in such a way as to slow down these nuclear vibrations . Thus , these focussed beams of light can cool a substance down .
A team of researcher at theNational Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST ) in Boulder , Colorado , wanted to cognize just how cold they could get a substance using this rather magical laser cooling method . organize light as best they could with their technological wizardry , they centre it at a rather diminished atomic number 13 membrane – just 20 micrometer gauge wide and 100 nanometers thick – and start out to cool down it .
Remarkably , this barrel - same minuscule objective was lower to a temperature of 0.00036 Kelvin , which is fundamentally the closest to absolute zero anything could realistically get . In fact , as reported in the journalNature , this little piece of metal was 10,000 time colder than the deep , sorry vacuum of space .
“ It ’s much colder than any by nature go on temperature anywhere in the universe , ” lead research worker John Teufel , a physicist at NIST , toldNew Scientist .
So why would you want to cool something like this ? As it so happens , this proficiency may be the key to unlocking truly effective quantum supercomputers , those that are hypothetically able to process info far faster than any current existing organization .
Quantum computer use qubits . Unlike normal computers , which expend binary bits that salt away info as 1s and 0s , qubits can be 1s , 0s , or 1 and 0 at the same time . This ability , although not yet practically harnessed , will revolutionize how we put in and work on digital entropy , but there ’s a job .
Noise , generated by any source , will cause these highly sensitive components to vibrate , which will distort the information that they are carrying . This will introduce small computing fault into the program unravel at the time , and anyone using it will get an imprecise answer .
However , if there is a means that they can be cooled to near - right-down zero temperatures on an atomic stage , then the data will remain undistorted . Fortunately , it seems like these beams of highly coordinate ignitor might grapple to do just that .
Image in text : The microscopic tympan that was the quarry of the cooling . Teufel / NIST
