Approaching The Absolute Zero Temperature: Just a Billionth Degree Away

The Science of Cold

The man had conquered heat for centuries, ever since the ancestors struck that stone together to produce the spark that revolutionalised the way we survive. With the heat, we can forge arrows, matches for both hunting and the occasional wars. With time we even built the internal combustion engine (ICE) which revolutionalised the way we move and travel.

But the technology of cold is something that is not older than 250 years since the first refrigerator came into existence in 1834.

Imagine life today without the cold. That means your supermarket will have no frozen food, airconditioning system in officers and skyscrapers will not exist. No ice cream/ ice making/ cooling machine of any kind. That will be taking the world back some 300 years.

In the area of medicine, there will be a way to cool the brain down to carry out some surgeries on the heart, spinal cord, etc. to reduce the risk of brain damage. The liquid oxygen is useful to patients to sustain breathing and as an oxidiser in space mission fuel supplement for combustion in spacecraft oxygen in high altitude flight with little or no oxygen-rich atmosphere.

The cooling technology, which some may take for granted, is there again in the new field of quantum computing. The rule here is to keep the qubits, analogous to the classical binary bits found in traditional computers, super cold or near absolute zero. The teeny tiny particles inside the qubits are kept at such a low temperature to maintain/ or keep it stable or risk a change due to thermal vibration or interference. Now, with quantum computing, crunching a million computation had never been this easy.

Scientists every day work hard on getting the holy grail of cold: the absolute zero (0 kelvin or −273.15°Celsius or −459.67° on the Fahrenheit ). The attempt to get to absolute zero temperature is as elusive as the attempt to travel at the speed of light. That is not stopping the scientists from trying.

What if we get to absolute zero?

Things genuinely get a bit weird and fast as we approach the absolute zero. The ultra-cold region has seen some super chilled gas reactions occur at farther distances, where the separation is up to 100 times apart than the response that can happen at near the room temperature.

The experiments show the lower the temperature, the less reaction we can expect.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to the Rescue

The principle named after the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg who proposed it in 1927. It is useful in the explanation involving microscopic particle in the scale of sub-atomic particles or atoms.

The simplest definition of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) is that one may never be sure of all the going on.

In life, it is a good thing that we do not know what next will happen. If we do, it will be as dull as watching the same movie all over again; you know that particular actress/actor is about to be murdered. What is the fun in that? But scientists wish to know, and it has always been their dream to find out what happens next, but HUP is there to tell them to let the dream stop.

For instance, the simplest explanation of HUP in science can determine the exact speed or position of a microscopic particle but never the two.
But it is difficult to determine the precision of both of these quantities even if you measure simultaneously. You can only either measure the position or the speed, but never the two.

This is because HUP already made us aware that measurement of the position will disturb the speed or the other way round if the speed is what is measured. So we are caught in the situation where there is no escaping the HUP.

Relevance of HUP in the Quest for Absolute Zero Temperature

If the mass m, of a particle, is travelling at a velocity v

The particle's linear momentum is a product of m and v, i.e. p=mv

Expressing the HUP
Mathematically :

Δq x Δv ≥ ħ/m

where

Δq = uncertainty in the position of a particle, in meters (m)

m= mass in kilogram

Δv = uncertainity in speed, in meters per second (m/s)

ħ is a constant= Plank's constant (h)/2π

But to get absolute zero, almost all molecular movement at quantum level will cease (or in quantum level slow down). When that happens, the circumstance is no longer in agreement with the HUP, which states that it is impossible to measure both location and velocity with absolute precision. So, in other words, if the particle has a kind of kinetic energy, there is heat, and thus the temperature is not at absolute zero.

Much ado about zero

The theoretical limit of absolute zero is one you hear a lot in science, why is it even relevant?

Scientists have so far gotten to a billionth degree Kelvin degree, but the absolute zero is still as elusive as the getting to the speed of light.

The weird part of science is something we get to experience as we move down near the absolute zero. It is in this range that a dilute gas turns into a Bose-Einstein Condensate which I wrote an article on here. The superfluid effect (fluid that behaves as if it has zero viscosity and defy gravity by flowing uphill) comes into play and other macroscopic quantum phenomena such as superconductivity.

Superconductivity is when a material conducts electricity with zero resistance. It finds a lot of application in engineering especially at the construction of levitating super speed trains.

The noise in a system decreases as the temperature reduces. That makes absolute zero great for studying the interaction of atoms and other properties of a material. This thermal noise when it is decreased, helps sensitive probe in space, for instance, particle detectors, radio telescopes, all benefit from these when analysing data in deep space.

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^REFERENCES

• ^{Absolute zero}
• ^{What happens at absolute zero?}
• ^{What is so important about absolute zero?}
• ^{Uncertainty principle}
• ^{Noise Temperature}

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