Latest Absolute zero Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online People take it for granted in most northern climes the temperatures will drop below zero at some point during the winter. What is normal in nature is impossible in physics: a minus temperature. Minus temperatures are only surprising on the Celsius scale during the summer. On the Kelvin, or absolute temperature scale used by physicists, it is impossible to go below zero. At least, it is impossible to get colder than zero Kelvin....

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Two new studies, both published in Nature this week, outline incredible breakthroughs in the field of quantum mechanics. Australian engineers led an international team of researchers to create the first working quantum bit based on a single atom in silicon, potentially making another important step toward ultra-powerful quantum computing that theoreticians have dreamt of for decades. The team describes how they were able to read...

Excitons form Bose-Einstein condensate Physicists have trapped and cooled exotic particles called excitons so effectively that they condensed and cohered to form a giant matter wave. This feat will allow scientists to better study the physical properties of excitons, which exist only fleetingly yet offer promising applications as diverse as efficient harvesting of solar energy and ultrafast computing. "The realization of the exciton condensate in a trap opens the opportunity to study...

For the first time, researchers have been able to combine different climate models using spatial statistics - to project future seasonal temperature changes in regions across North America. They performed advanced statistical analysis on two different North American regional climate models and were able to estimate projections of temperature changes for the years 2041 to 2070, as well as the certainty of those projections. The analysis, developed by statisticians at Ohio State...

Physicists at Harvard University have realized a new way to cool synthetic materials by employing a quantum algorithm to remove excess energy. The research, published this week in the journal Nature, is the first application of such an "algorithmic cooling" technique to ultra-cold atomic gases, opening new possibilities from materials science to quantum computation. "Ultracold atoms are the coldest objects in the known universe," explains senior author Markus Greiner, associate professor...

Diamond, nature's hardest known substance, is essential for our modern mechanical world – drills, cutters, and grinding wheels exploit the durability of diamonds to power a variety of industries. But diamonds have properties that may also make them excellent materials to enable the next generation of solid-state quantum computers and electrical and magnetic sensors. To further explore diamonds' quantum computing potential, researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China...

TAU uses quantum mechanics to melt glass at Absolute ZeroQuantum mechanics, developed in the 1920s, has had an enormous impact in explaining how matter works. The elementary particles that make up different forms of matter "” such as electrons, protons, neutrons and photons "” are well understood within the model quantum physics provides. Even now, some 90 years later, new scientific principles in quantum physics are being described. The most recent gives the world a glimpse into the...

Completely new source of light for many applicationsPhysicists from the University of Bonn have developed a completely new source of light, a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate consisting of photons. Until recently, experts had thought this impossible. This method may potentially be suitable for designing novel light sources resembling lasers that work in the x-ray range. Among other applications, they might allow building more powerful computer chips. The scientists are reporting on their...

Ever since audiences heard Goldfinger utter the famous line, "No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die," as a laser beam inched its way toward James Bond and threatened to cut him in half, lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy capable of burning through anything in their path.Now a team of Yale physicists has used lasers for a completely different purpose, employing them to cool molecules down to temperatures near what's known as absolute zero, about -460 degrees...

A sensitive measuring device must not be dropped - because this usually destroys the precision of the instrument. A team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has done exactly this, however. And the researchers want to use this experience to make the measuring instrument even more sensitive. The team, headed by physicists from the University of Hanover, dropped a piece of apparatus, in which they generated a weightless Bose-Einstein condensate...