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Europhysics news

Progress in Refrigeration to Ultralow Temperatures

Frank Pobell

Published Jan 1, 1982• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Although in terms of degrees, temperatures extremely close to absolute zero were achieved many years ago, the struggle to attain ever lower temperatures continues.
DOI
10.1051/epn/19821312007

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Forty years ago, twenty years after the discovery of the laser, physicists were developing laser cooling methods for ions trapped in electromagnetic fields.From the 1980s onwards, these techniques were refined and extended to atoms, thanks to the audacity and inventiveness of a generation of pioneering researchers.Actually, it was necessary to succeed simultaneously in trapping and cooling samples of atomic gases in a vacuum at a distance from any wall.Spectacular results followed and extraordinarily low temperatures were quickly reached, very close to absolute zero.The field of "cold atoms" was born, rewarded by successive Nobel prizes, first of which was awarded in 1997 to William D. Phillips, Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, last in 2022 to Alain Aspect.Gaseous samples of a few thousand to a few billion atoms can be prepared at a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, which means that the particles move at extremely low speed, of the order of centimetres per second.At these extreme temperatures, the behaviour of matter changes and its properties can only be described using quantum mechanics and the wave properties of particles.New physical phenomena have been discovered and innovations have followed the theoretical and experimental progress of the research.Initially imagined as a wonderful method for perfecting atomic physics, cold atoms have gradually proved to be powerful tools for research in cross-cutting fields of physics, such as condensed matter and even high-energy physics.These atoms are now referred to as 'quantum gases' at such low temperatures that their collective behaviour is modified by the laws of quantum mechanics.

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News Briefs

Researchers at JILA, a joint program of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, recently announced that they achieved a temperature far lower than any previously produced and created an entirely new state of matter predicted 70 years ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.A paper in the July 14 Science by the researchers describe how the team cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 nK above absolute zero.The extreme cold caused the individual atoms to condense into a ''superatom'' that behaved as a single entity.Before photographing the superatomknown as a Bose-Einstein condensate-the physicists cooled the atoms to 20 nK above absolute zero, the lowest temperature ever achieved.The achievement climaxed a 15 year search by physicists worldwide for the condensate.

Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology•Sep 1, 1995•0 citations
The second and third laws of thermodynamics can be used to establish a fundamental bound for the maximum possible cooling rate in approaching the absolute zero of temperature. In modeling the behavior of the molecular refrigerators geared toward attaining ultralow temperatures, only quantum mechanical, as opposed to classical physics, models can be admissible. As a simple model, we analyze a three-level quantum refrigerator, and in particular its irreversible thermodynamic performance as absolute zero is approached.
Forty years ago, twenty years after the discovery of the laser, physicists were developing laser cooling methods for ions trapped in electromagnetic fields.From the 1980s onwards, these techniques were refined and extended to atoms, thanks to the audacity and inventiveness of a generation of pioneering researchers.Actually, it was necessary to succeed simultaneously in trapping and cooling samples of atomic gases in a vacuum at a distance from any wall.Spectacular results followed and extraordinarily low temperatures were quickly reached, very close to absolute zero.The field of "cold atoms" was born, rewarded by successive Nobel prizes, first of which was awarded in 1997 to William D. Phillips, Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, last in 2022 to Alain Aspect.Gaseous samples of a few thousand to a few billion atoms can be prepared at a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, which means that the particles move at extremely low speed, of the order of centimetres per second.At these extreme temperatures, the behaviour of matter changes and its properties can only be described using quantum mechanics and the wave properties of particles.New physical phenomena have been discovered and innovations have followed the theoretical and experimental progress of the research.Initially imagined as a wonderful method for perfecting atomic physics, cold atoms have gradually proved to be powerful tools for research in cross-cutting fields of physics, such as condensed matter and even high-energy physics.These atoms are now referred to as 'quantum gases' at such low temperatures that their collective behaviour is modified by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Researchers at JILA, a joint program of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, recently announced that they achieved a temperature far lower than any previously produced and created an entirely new state of matter predicted 70 years ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.A paper in the July 14 Science by the researchers describe how the team cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 nK above absolute zero.The extreme cold caused the individual atoms to condense into a ''superatom'' that behaved as a single entity.Before photographing the superatomknown as a Bose-Einstein condensate-the physicists cooled the atoms to 20 nK above absolute zero, the lowest temperature ever achieved.The achievement climaxed a 15 year search by physicists worldwide for the condensate.