Cooling magnets with sound

MARCH 6, 2020

Cooling magnets with sound

by University of Innsbruck

The motion of magnetic objects can be made to interact with their internal acoustic waves. In this way, as physicists from Innsbruck show, nanoparticles can be cooled down to such an extent that they exhibit quantum properties.

Today, most quantum experiments are carried out with the help of light, including those in nanomechanics, in which tiny objects are cooled with electromagnetic waves to such an extent that they reveal quantum properties. Now, a team of physicists at the University of Innsbruck and the Austrian Academy of Sciences is proposing to cool microparticles with sound waves instead.

While quantum physics is usually concerned with the basic building blocks of light and matter, for some time, scientists have been trying to investigate the quantum properties of larger objects, thereby probing the boundary between the quantum world and everyday life. For this purpose, particles are slowed down with the help of electromagnetic waves and the motional energy is drastically reduced. This is described as " motional cooling. " Quantum properties occur when particles are cooled to their fundamental quantum ground state, that is, to the lowest possible energy level.

So far, the only way to cool particles to the ground state has been to make them interact with photons trapped in an electromagnetic resonator. But theoretical physicists now propose to make the motion of magnetic particles interact with the internal acoustic waves that are confined inside every particle.

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