Daylight may cool an atom to its coldest potential temperature

Daylight may very well be used to chill a charged atom to its lowest temperature allowed by the legal guidelines of physics.

Within the Nineteen Nineties, a number of folks gained Nobel prizes for figuring out the way to make atoms extraordinarily chilly with exactly managed laser mild. Now, Amanda Younes and Wesley Campbell on the College of California, Los Angeles, have discovered that some components of the cooling course of may very well be achieved with mild straight from the solar.

The researchers calculated how a single positively charged barium atom, or ion, …