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JILA Physicists Achieve Elusive "Evaporative Cooling" of Molecules


December 19, 2012

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Achieving a goal considered nearly impossible, physicists at JILA have chilled a gas of molecules to very low temperatures by adapting the familiar process by which a hot cup of coffee cools. Evaporative cooling has long been used to cool atoms, at JILA and elsewhere, to extraordinarily low temperatures. The process was used at JILA in 1995 to create the Bose-Einstein condensate. The latest demonstration marks the first time evaporative cooling has been achieved with molecules.Full Story

Source
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

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