A laser called Octopus

There's still a few more videos to come from Backstage Science, and here's the latest.



Octopus is a very cool name for a laser with different "arms" coming from a central hub.

Though it does lose a few cool points when you learn the name's an acronym for Optics Clustered To OutPut Unique Solutions.

But we don't have to talk about that!

You can learn more about lasers at the STFC's Central Laser Facility at this link.

And here's another backstage video about lasers at the STFC.

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!?