Scientists freeze gas with lasers

[Rustedsoda]

it's a few years old, but you know stuff like this often gets overlooked.

Apparently, the ice beam causes such a rapid loss of electrons that the gas drops in temperature 119 degrees, within seconds.

Of particular note here is the word gas, and not liquid. The gas is cooled so rapidly that it remains a gas at otherwise unlikely temperatures. Water, on a similar note, has been pushed to a liquid 44 degrees.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2 ... g-tech-yet


I'ts not the sorta thing you can just aim and fire when you need to wipe out energy-sucking jellyfish, or scale a deep pit using enemies, but in it's current stage it has tremendous commercial potential.

[TheBlackCat]

Strange, I wonder why the electrons don't just jump back down to lower orbitals. I need to read more about this tomorrow. Unfortunately popsci links to wired, which doesn't appear to link to anything, so I need to track down the original article Too late...must sleep....

[Rustedsoda]

Because Journalism. They probably meant to say that, though the gist of it all comes down to less molecular energy.

[Emperor Ing]

This doesn't change the fact that Science Team has vapor for brains.

[TheBlackCat]

The problem is that if the electrons jump back down to lower energy then this won't work. There needs to be some way for them to stay in the higher orbitals or they won't absorb energy. But normally electrons don't stay in higher orbitals because it is less stable.

You can think about it like a hill with a ball on it. The ball normally sits at the bottom of the hill. Now say you roll it half way up the hill. This takes energy (energy they claim comes from cooling the gas). However, the ball normally won't stay there, it will roll back down to the bottom of the hill. In atoms, this would put the energy right back into the gas, keeping the temperature the same (or probably increasing it slightly, since the laser would add energy).

There needs to be some way to keep the ball half way up the hill. How they are doing that in this case isn't clear from the article. However, atoms are not hills, there are all sorts of weird things can happen in atoms where these sorts of analogies don't work, but what that might be in this case I don't know.

[Rustedsoda]

Tell them. They already did it.

[Naner]

This doesn't change the fact that Science Team has vapor for brains.

And you're so much smarter than them, aren't you?

[Emperor Ing]

At least I know that Metroids aren't pets.

[Rustedsoda]

YES THEY ARE D:

Why do you think they're shooting lasers at gas?? so they can do it to jellyfish later...