Lab Home | Phone | Search | ||||||||
|
||||||||
Contrary to intuition, we can cool a gas by shining a laser on it. This lecture will describe how laser cooling works, and how this process has allowed us to reach temperatures less than a microdegree above absolute zero--millions of times colder than the darkest regions of outer space. Atomic clocks using these ultra-cold atoms now have an accuracy better that one second in 300 million years, and new states of matter arising from sub-microdegree gases are opening avenues of research undreamt of in the 20th century. Host: Bob Ecke |