Maximum cold level

1992/04/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Fisika

Albert Einstein said: If the temperature of a gas is around the absolute zero, the atoms will lose their personality and become soups of atoms.

This condensation is what they want to achieve at the astrophysics institute in the Boulder laboratory in Colorado. They will use the technique called "laser cooling". For this purpose they have six precisely tuned and focused infrared lasers.

The temperature of a gas depends on the stirring speed. The higher the temperature, the more it moves and the colder it is, the slower it is.

Dr. Wieman of the aforementioned laboratory explains the procedure as follows: "Due to the large amount of energy lost by laser-trapped cesium gas atoms, collisions cannot occur between them. Once the laser is disconnected, the atoms fall slowly, as they do not have enough energy to withstand gravity itself."

The absolute zero is located at -273'15 degrees Celsius and the temperature to be reached with this test is one million degrees higher than the absolute zero. Once this was achieved, the world record would be broken and we would be on track to prove what Einstein announced.