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Finding Patterns

Adventures of an artist travelling obliquely through science
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molecule+cooling+web.jpg

Molecule Cooling - Optics Table

January 15, 2012

This beautiful optics table took two years to build.  It exists in the physics department basement.  Quite a few different colours (or energies) of laser light are required to cool a molecule due to the more complex energy level structures (compared with an atom) - resulting in this lovely spectacle.  The molecules are cooled to temperatures colder than outer space of less than a mK by hitting them with carefully tuned photons of light that exactly match the quantum energy levels of the molecule taking into account the doppler effect.

In beauty, experiment, light, quantum mechanics, spectra Tags physics
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