File:Optical molasses.gif

Nonfiction: Optical molasses schematic.

In the News

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against physical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Optical molasses

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Boltzmann constant (nonfiction) -
• Circular polarization (nonfiction)
• Doppler cooling (nonfition)
• Laser cooling (nonfiction) - any of a number of techniques in which atomic and molecular samples are cooled down to near absolute zero. Laser cooling techniques rely on the fact that when an object (usually an atom) absorbs and re-emits a photon (a particle of light) its momentum changes. For an ensemble of particles, their thermodynamic temperature is proportional to the variance in their velocity. That is, more homogeneous velocities among particles corresponds to a lower temperature. Laser cooling techniques combine atomic spectroscopy with the aforementioned mechanical effect of light to compress the velocity distribution of an ensemble of particles, thereby cooling the particles.
• Magneto-optical trap (nonfiction) - an apparatus that uses laser cooling with magneto-optical trapping in order to produce samples of cold, trapped, neutral atoms at temperatures as low as several microkelvins, two or three times the recoil limit (see Doppler cooling limit). By combining the small momentum of a single photon with a velocity and spatially dependent absorption cross section and a large number of absorption-spontaneous emission cycles, atoms with initial velocities of hundreds of metres per second can be slowed to tens of centimetres per second.
• Physics (nonfiction)
• Planck constant (nonfiction) -
• Polarization (waves) (nonfiction)

External links

• Optical molasses @ Wikipedia

Attribution

• By Andreas Lilius - http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/illpres/trapping.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3854753