PartagerDes molécules portées à des températures proches du zéro absolu (en anglais).
Des chercheurs de l'Institut de technologie du Massachusetts sont parvenus à refroidir les molécules d'un alliage gazeux de sodium et potassium à une température de 500 nanokelvin.
Martin Zwierlein and his colleagues at MIT succeeded to chilling molecules in a gas of sodium potassium (NaK) to a temperature of 500 nanokelvins.
Cooling molecules directly is very difficult so the team started with cold individual sodium and potassium atoms. Then, they used a magnetic field to glue atoms together in a mechanism knows as a “Feshbach resonance”.
Researchers found the NaK molecules are more stable and have a relatively long lifetime (2.5 seconds) allowing for the possibility of new quantum states of matter.
http://news.mit.edu/2015/ultracold-molecules-0610
http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.205302
Cooling molecules directly is very difficult so the team started with cold individual sodium and potassium atoms. Then, they used a magnetic field to glue atoms together in a mechanism knows as a “Feshbach resonance”.
Researchers found the NaK molecules are more stable and have a relatively long lifetime (2.5 seconds) allowing for the possibility of new quantum states of matter.
http://news.mit.edu/2015/ultracold-molecules-0610
http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.205302