Light is modified and turned into the optimal waveform to reduce the speed of particles.
Light is modified and turned into the optimal waveform to reduce the speed of particles. Tailor-made laser light fields can be used to slow down the movement of several particles and thus cool them down to extremely low temperatures - as shown by a team from TU Wien. Using lasers to slow down atoms is a technique that has been used for a long time already: If one wants to achieve low-temperature world records in the range of absolute temperature zero, one resorts to laser cooling, in which energy is extracted from the atoms with a suitable laser beam. Recently, such techniques have also been applied to small particles in the nanoand micro-metre range. This already works quite well for individual particles - but if you want to cool several particles at once, the problem turns out to be much more difficult. Prof. Stefan Rotter and his team at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at TU Wien have now presented a method with which extremely effective cooling can also be achieved in this case. Not just a beam, but a whole light pattern.
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