Record Cold in Cambridge – half a billionth of a degree above absolute zero
A team of physicists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created the coolest thing in the world. Using a labyrinth of lasers, lenses, and magnetic fields, the scientists chilled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded, half a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.
“Sometimes your strategy is just to go for the record,” said Wolfgang Ketterle, one of the team’s leaders, a long-distance runner who compared breaking the record to when he ran a marathon in less than three hours. “Just for the heck of it — going for the record brings out the best in you.”
The guy should know. Ketterle shared a Nobel Prize in 2001 for cooling gas to a temperature so cold that its atoms entered a never-before-seen state of matter: They moved in unison instead of jumping around randomly at varying speeds as they usually do.