The latest news from academia, regulators research labs and
other things of interest Posted: December 7, 2009 Super cool
atom thermometer (Nanowerk News) As physicists strive to cool
atoms down to ever more frigid temperatures, they face the
daunting task of developing new, reliable ways of measuring
these extreme lows. Now a team of physicists has devised a
thermometer that can potentially measure temperatures as low as
tens of trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. Their
experiment is reported in the current issue of Physical Review
Letters and highlighted with a Viewpoint in the December 7 issue
of Physics. Physicists have developed a new thermometry method
suitable for measuring temperatures of ultracold atoms.
(Illustration: Alan Stonebraker) Physicists can currently cool
atoms to a few billionths of a degree, but even this is too hot
for certain applications. For example, Richard Feynman dreamed
of using ultracold atoms to simulate the complex quantum
mechanical behavior of electrons in certain ma