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Team Refrigerates Liquids With a Laser for the First Time

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @12:08PM   
from the very-cool dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Since the first laser was invented in 1960, they've always given off heat -- either as a useful tool, a byproduct or a fictional way to vanquish intergalactic enemies.

But those concentrated beams of light have never been able to cool liquids. University of Washington researchers are the first to solve a decades-old puzzle -- figuring out how to make a laser refrigerate water and other liquids under real-world conditions.

In a study to be published the week of Nov. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team used an infrared laser to cool water by about 36 degrees Fahrenheit -- a major breakthrough in the field.

"Typically, when you go to the movies and see Star Wars laser blasters, they heat things up. This is the first example of a laser beam that will refrigerate liquids like water under everyday conditions," said senior author Peter Pauzauskie, UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. "It was really an open question as to whether this could be done because normally water warms when illuminated."

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Original Submission

• Laser cooling Laser cooling (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday November 18 2015, @12:44PM

  by stormwyrm (717) on Wednesday November 18 2015, @12:44PM (#264815) Journal

  Lasers are already being used to cool atoms to extremely low temperatures a hair above absolute zero. They managed to make the first observed Bose-Einstein condensates by using laser cooling [wikipedia.org]. I suppose this must be a variation on this technique that can manage to lower the temperatures of macroscopic quantities of matter. I've not heard of laser cooling techniques being used to lower the temperatures of anything more than a handful of trapped ions or atoms before.

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• Re:Laser cooling (Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday November 18 2015, @12:47PM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday November 18 2015, @12:47PM (#264816) Homepage

  This macro enough for you?
  
  http://news.mit.edu/2007/super-cool
  """
  Laser-cooling brings large object near absolute zero
  
  Assistant professor Nergis Mavalvala, left, and Ph.D. student Thomas Corbitt are part of an international team that has devised a way to cool large objects to near absolute zero.
  
  Anne Trafton, News Office
  April 5, 2007
  
  Using a laser-cooling technique that could one day allow scientists to observe quantum behavior in large objects, MIT researchers have cooled a coin-sized object to within one degree of absolute zero.
  
  This study marks the coldest temperature ever reached by laser-cooling of an object of that size, and the technique holds promise that it will experimentally confirm, for the first time, that large objects obey the laws of quantum mechanics just as atoms do.
  """

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