Sunlight could cool an atom to its coldest possible temperature

Daylight could possibly be used to chill a charged atom to its lowest temperature allowed by the legal guidelines of physics.

Within the Nineties, a number of individuals received Nobel prizes for figuring out how to make atoms extremely cold with exactly managed laser mild. Now, Amanda Younes and Wesley Campbell on the College of California, Los Angeles, have discovered that some elements of the cooling course of could possibly be achieved with mild straight from the solar.

The researchers calculated how a single positively charged barium atom, or ion, …