Carbon is the basis of life. There are a lot of secrets on earth and in the heavens above us. Columbia's Daniel Wolf Savin is an astronomer who studies the chemistry of the stars and planets in the universe.
It's difficult to mimic these clouds in a lab because they are so cold. Will's lab uses lasers to chill atoms to their limits. Physicists' typical choices of atoms and molecules don't show up often in everyday life because of the rapid advancement of laser cooling techniques. Savin wanted to know if he could cool the carbon molecule.
Niccol Bigagli, Savin, and Will collaborated on a study that was published in the journal Physical Review A.
The first step in cooling an atom or molecule is to understand how it absorbs and emits light; that process reduces the energy of the molecule and brings it to a halt. The data for carbon atoms in the University College London's ExoMol database is an open-sourced resource that can be used to study the atmosphere of exoplanets.
Savin noted that Bigagli dove into the data from ExoMol and developed a scheme that should be able to use lasers to cool carbon molecule down to very cold temperatures. Will pointed out that the cold carbon molecule could be trapped with optical tweezers for high-precision spectroscopy or for reaction experiments to study their quantum chemistry.
Bigagli said it's incredible to think about the possibilities of what we could do with the new laser cooling scheme. Combining carbon with hydrogen could be used to study hydrocarbons.
There is a chance that more options may be on the table than previously realized because carbon molecule is different from molecule that have been laser-cooled in labs. Bigagli said that carbon molecule could be the bridge between physicists and chemists. The team is analyzing more data to find more interesting molecule that could be laser-cooled, as well as thinking about what they might add to cooled carbon.
Will hopes his lab will be able to build the necessary laser setup soon, as only actual experiments will tell how successful the carbon cooling scheme will be. He said that this will work with state-of-the-art technology and that they just need the resources to put it together.
More information: Niccolò Bigagli et al, Laser cooling scheme for the carbon dimer ( 12C2 ), Physical Review A (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.105.L051301 Journal information: Physical Review A
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