Fire the Laser!

I guess most people associated lasers with scenes like this from James Bond.

But our latest video on Sixty Symbols shows that they can be used to make things extremely cold.

By firing specially tuned lasers at a small cloud of atoms, lasers can essentially take all the "jiggly energy" out of the atoms... And it is this jiggling which gives the atoms their heat!

A better explanation is here in this video:



Using photons to slow down atoms was described to me in quite a clever way.

It is like stopping a charging elephant by serving tennis balls at it!

Anyway, there was plenty of left-over footage from this video, so here is some more interview clips with Professor Peter Kruger that I popped onto our Test Tube "behind the scenes" site.



But just in case you want to see a laser that DOES cut stuff, here's another video I made a while ago!

We used the laser is used to cut butter, would you believe!?