An anonymous reader writes “Ever since audiences heard Goldfinger utter the famous line, “No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die,” as a laser beam inched its way toward James Bond and threatened to cut him in half, lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy capable of burning through anything in their path. Now a team of Yale physicists has used lasers for a completely different purpose, employing them to cool molecules down to temperatures near what’s known as absolute zero, about -460 degrees Fahrenheit. Their new method for laser cooling, described in the online edition of the journal Nature, is a significant step toward the ultimate goal of using individual molecules as information bits in quantum computing.”

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Originally posted here:
Scientists Using Lasers To Cool Molecules