August 18, 2016

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According to basic thermodynamics laws, if you leave a warm apple pie in a winter window eventually the pie will cool down to the temperature of the surrounding air. For scientists, cooling samples of charged particles makes them easier to control and study. So they use a similar approach, trapping ions and immersing them in clouds of cold atoms -- much like the warm pie in the window. New research, however demonstrates ions never truly cool to the temperature of the surrounding gas.Full Story

Source
University of California, Los Angeles

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