Cooling with heat

[fritzd]

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Cooling with heat

"A quantum system can be cooled with a blast of hot incoherent light. That's the surprising conclusion of theoretical physicists in Germany who have shown that the rate of cooling can sometimes be increased by putting a system in contact with a hot entity. The scheme – which has not been tested in the lab – could offer a simple way of cooling quantum devices.

Since the 1980s physicists have been cooling gases of atoms using coherent laser light. This method works by having atoms absorbing and emitting photons such that the atoms gradually loose momentum. This technique only works if the light is coherent – if it isn't coherent the light simply heats up the gas.
But now Jens Eisert and Andrea Mari of the Freie Universitaet Berlin have come up with a way of using incoherent light to cool a quantum system. Their system is a mechanical quantum oscillator that is coupled to two optical modes – however Eisert stresses that it can be applied to a wide range of three mode quantum systems."

Pretty cool interesting stuff. hehe More here!
Cooling with heat - physicsworld.com

[cromagnon]

So where can this be applicable in the future , on space frontiers ? medicine , Factory?

[fritzd]

"According to Eisert several experimental groups are now working on realizing the system in the lab. Possible applications of the effect include cooling quantum devices such as atomic clocks or tiny mechanical resonators using incoherent light from relatively inexpensive LEDs."

Last paragraph. Some more technical details on their arXiv paper. [1104.0260] Cooling by heating

This is also fundamental physics. You don't expect applications straight away. It's almost in the same level as quantum physics. The idea alone is amazing enough. Applications will surely come when the time comes.