Scientists Reach A Temperature Lower Than Absolute Zero

[link to newrisingmedia.com]

Isn't it possible in theory to "freeze" life in suspended animation if you get down to a certain temperature? Below what has been accomplished as of now?

Stick a thermometer in space it'll read -172. That's pretty Damn cold...

Holy fuck sticks this is BIG news!

Bigger than that shitty higgs boson god particle!

"This unusual advance could lead to new engines that could technically be more than 100 percent efficient,"


Read more: [link to www.foxnews.com]

How is this possible?

All matter and particles stop moving at absolute zero. No friction or energy is transmitted. There is no heat whatsoever.

How can you have anti-heat?

you mean like in the movie day after tomorrow? yea its possible, it happened to a mammoth they found

[link to www.youtube.com]

so i guess you can travel faster than the speed of light too.

Exactly what I was wondering...

At absolute zero everything "stops" in the molecular level...

How you go beyond "everything stopped"???

yeah, its slowly coming out...

in the movies you can

what if a bunch of laws just changed

Then it shows just how lawless we are.

that would be great...

Specially if the laws of thermodynamics changes...

I really HATE conservation of energy!!!

From Wikipedia, A good explanation of negative temps in relation to absolute zero.
Negative temperatures

Main article: Negative temperature

Temperatures that are expressed as negative numbers on the familiar Celsius or Fahrenheit scales are simply colder than the zero points of those scales. Certain systems can achieve truly negative temperatures; that is, their thermodynamic temperature (expressed in kelvin) can be of a negative quantity. A system with a truly negative temperature is not colder than absolute zero. Rather, a system with a negative temperature is hotter than any system with a positive temperature in the sense that if a negative-temperature system and a positive-temperature system come in contact, heat will flow from the negative- to the positive-temperature system.[9]

Most familiar systems cannot achieve negative temperatures because adding energy always increases their entropy. However, some systems have a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins to decrease. Because temperature is defined by the relationship between energy and entropy, such a system's temperature becomes negative, even though energy is being added.[9] As a result, the Boltzmann factor for states of systems at negative temperature increases rather than decreases with increasing state energy. Therefore no complete system, i.e. including the electromagnetic modes, can have negative temperatures, since there is no highest energy state, so that the sum of the probabilities of the states would diverge for negative temperatures. However, for quasi-equilibrium systems (e.g. spins out of equilibrium with the electromagnetic field) this argument does not apply, and negative effective temperatures are attainable.

In 2012, physicists created a quantum gas made up of potassium atoms with a negative temperature in motional degrees of freedom for the first time [10]

warpdrive navigation technolegy goes all in kinds of crazy directions

Yep, conservation of energy and entropy are tough to get around and really limit us exploring the uiniverse.

Read the article at newrisingmedia "With this negative temperature state, the gas dipped to "a few billionths of a Kelvin below absolute zero."

It's just a measuring or scaling issue. It's not like there's been a radical measurement like 20 Kelvin....an infinitesimally small measurement below.

In science when something happens like this,while amazing it needs to be repeated over and over, because a small error could easily account for this.

no, it is not possible to reach a temperature less than absolute zero. the scientists in germany must be smoking crack, or their research is not understood by whoever wrote the article.

very close to absolute zero, all motion stops, including vibration (the "brownian motion" you learned about in high school) on the molecular and atomic scale. you can reduce temperature further than that, by reducing the entropy of the system: rearrange the molecules and atoms to their lowest entropy possible. that could be considered "removing heat", because applying heat would have caused that higher entropy state.

when all possible entropy is removed, that is called the "zero-point crystalline state". that is "absolute zero temperature". it is impossible to remove any more entropy because you would have to start removing atoms etc. at which point it is no longer the same system. that would be like saying you have a system of three ice cubes which you made "colder" by removing one ice cube. it is true, you have removed heat and entropy therefore it is "lower temperature", but your system of three ice cubes no longer exists.

because of the differences in "heat" expressed by vibration (the conventional heat we are familiar with) and expressed by more or less entropy of a particular system, there are special equations used to calculate "temperature" when close to absolute zero that are quite nonlinear, unlike the rest of the temperature spectrum we are familiar with that is normally expressed as Kelvin and Fahrenheit.

I think at most, it would merely change the precision in which we measure the absolute zero limit, not radically change things.

"With this breakthrough has come some rather interesting side effects, leading to potential "new forms of matter. For example, while atoms are usually pulled downward by gravity, those below absolute zero float upwards instead."

Thanks OP for the post, huge news. Pin worthy!

[link to img.photobucket.com]

Cool. I'd think this would be bigger news if it were true.

Warp 9

Floats in gravity?!

cold light computing yeah lol

Physicists have been able to create an atomic gas that can attain a temperature below absolute zero, -273.15˚C. They were able to create this gas using negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices. [link to scitechdaily.com]

they now also found that Atoms at negative absolute temperature: The hottest systems in the world..

"According to the physical meaning of temperature, the temperature of a gas is determined by the chaotic movement of its particles – the colder the gas, the slower the particles. At zero Kelvin (-460°F or -273°C) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. Thus, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. Physicists of the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have now created an atomic gas in the lab that has nonetheless negative Kelvin values (Science, Jan 4, 2013)."

Read more at: [link to phys.org]

For the interested in the theoretical frame of the paper, I leave you an extract from Braun, S. et al. (2012) "Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom" Science 339, 52-55:

"Absolute temperature T is one of the central concepts of statistical mechanics and is a measure of, for example, the amount of disordered motion in a classical ideal gas. Therefore, nothing can be colder than T = 0, where classical particles would be at rest. In a thermal state of such an ideal gas, the probability P_i [subindex i] for a particle to occupy a state i with kinetic energy E_i [subindex i] is proportional to the Boltzmann factor

exp{E_i/k_BT}

where k_B is Boltzmann’s constant. An ensemble at positive temperature is described by an occupation distribution that decreases exponentially with energy. If we were to extend this formula to negative absolute temperatures, exponentially increasing distributions would result. Because the distribution needs to be normalizable, at positive temperatures a lower bound in energy is required,
as the probabilities Pi would diverge for
E_i--> - infinite. Negative temperatures, on the other hand, demand an upper bound in energy (1, 2). In daily life, negative temperatures are absent, because kinetic energy in most systems, including particles in free space, only provides a lower energy bound. Even in lattice systems, where kinetic energy is split into distinct bands, implementing an upper energy bound for motional degrees of
freedom is challenging, because potential and interaction
energy need to be limited as well (3, 4). So far, negative temperatures have been realized in localized spin systems (5–7), where the finite, discrete spectrum naturally provides both lower and upper energy bounds. Here, we were able to realize a negative temperature state for motional degrees of freedom (...)"


Cited References:

1. N. F. Ramsey, Phys. Rev. 103, 20 (1956).
2. M. J. Klein, Phys. Rev. 104, 589 (1956).
3. A. P. Mosk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 040403 (2005).
4. A. Rapp, S. Mandt, A. Rosch, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105,
220405 (2010).
5. E. M. Purcell, R. V. Pound, Phys. Rev. 81, 279 (1951).
6. A. S. Oja, O. V. Lounasmaa, Rev. Mod. Phys. 69, 1
(1997).