Just a quick link about an upcoming article in Physical Review Letters (btw. does this journal’s name sound like an oxymoron to you as well?). The scientists of the LIGO have managed to cool down a dime sized mirror to a bit less than 1 Kelvin; all just by two simple laser irradiation procedures: optical trapping keeps the mirror in place, while optical damping cools it down.
These temperatures are still far off from actually observing quantum effects, but as far as cooling macro-objects this is a first. Maybe, after some more fractions of that remaining Kelvin they will see the freezing of macroscopic natural forces and that mirror will only be subject to quantum mechanics.
What will we see then? My bet would be disintegration of the mirror, but maybe something completely different could happen. Who knows, after all its just statistics from there…
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