What is The Coldest Place In The Universe?

Do you know?

Hint:  It might not be as far away as you would think.  Is it in some galaxy billions of light years away?  Or perhaps on the icy surface of a planet far away from our solar system?  This shows how to create pretty much the coldest place in the universe.  Here is a bit more on how they do it:

A Bose-Einstein Condensate of sodium atoms is created in lab at MIT by Martin Zwierlein. Using highly focused, single frequency lasers it is possible to cool the single sodium atoms, negating their thermal vibrations by inducing electronic transitions which effectively “pushes” them into place. This brings the atoms down to millikelivn temperatures.

However to achieve nanokelvin temperatures, magnetic fields are used to trap the atoms in a well or cup so that the atomic resonance of the atoms begins to match the frequency of the laser light so that , like in a cup of coffee or tea, the hottest atoms are boiled off the surface by “blowing” on the atoms with polarized laser light. This makes the atoms that are in resonance with the light move towards the center, leaving the hotter atoms to boil off. This then shrinks the gas cloud into a supercool sphere.

 

Does this boggle your mind or what? And here is the continuation:

This arrangement is known as a magneto-optical trap and using it the atoms can be made colder than anywhere else in the universe, cold enough for the subtle effects of quantum mechanics to make the wavefunction of the atoms coherent, just like how a laser makes the photons in a laser medium coherent. The wavefunctions then constructively interfere until the atoms behave as a single quantum object known as a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

In quantum mechanics, a class of particles which have an integer quantum spin are called bosons. For example, photons, gluons, higgs boson etc. Any number of bosons can go to the same quantum state. Thus they obey Bose-Einstein statistics. The wave function associated with bosons is symmetric.

We hope you enjoy the video who knew this was possible?  Feel free to comment with your ideas on this awesome info!

thanks to Muon Ray for the info



16 Comments

  1. Mike Guay said:

    It’s actually fairly close to home. Deep craters on the moon and Mercury which never receive sunlight of any kind.
    Oh, also Raphael Eduardo Cruz’s bed and or heart.

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