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Physicists reach one-fifth quanta cooling

hellcat writes:

Physicists at the NIST have cooled an object below the so-called "quantum limit."

Described in the Jan. 12, 2017, issue of Nature, showed that a microscopic mechanical drum could be cooled to less than one-fifth of a single quantum, or packet of energy, lower than ordinarily predicted by quantum physics.

The new technique theoretically could be used to cool objects to absolute zero, the temperature at which matter is devoid of nearly all energy and motion, NIST scientists said.

http://phys.org/news/2017-01-physicists-cool-microscopic-quantum-limit.html

Physicists Cool Object to Below "Quantum Limit"

takyon writes:

Physicists have used microwave light to cool an object to less than one-fifth of a quantum of energy:

"The colder you can get the drum, the better it is for any application," said NIST physicist John Teufel, who led the experiment. "Sensors would become more sensitive. You can store information longer. If you were using it in a quantum computer, then you would compute without distortion, and you would actually get the answer you want."

"The results were a complete surprise to experts in the field," Teufel's group leader and co-author José Aumentado said. "It's a very elegant experiment that will certainly have a lot of impact."

The drum, 20 micrometers in diameter and 100 nanometers thick, is embedded in a superconducting circuit designed so that the drum motion influences the microwaves bouncing inside a hollow enclosure known as an electromagnetic cavity. [...] NIST scientists previously cooled the quantum drum to its lowest-energy "ground state," or one-third of one quantum.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2