The heat pump is made from particles of light. The device may be useful in the search for dark matter because it brings scientists closer to the quantum limit of measuring radio frequencies. Science Advances will publish their work as an open-access article in August.
If you put a warm bottle of wine into a cold chill pack, the heat from the wine to the chill pack will flow in one direction. If you wait long enough, the two will reach the same temperature, a process known as reaching equilibrium, in which the heat flow one way and the other is equal.
Break this balance and you can cause heat to flow in the wrong way. This principle is used in your refrigerator to keep your food cold and in efficient heat pumps that can steal heat from the cold air outside to warm your house Gary Steele and his co-authors show how quantum particles of light can move against the flow from a hot to a cold object.
The dark matter is indicative of something.
In a previous study, the researchers used their device as a cold bath for hot radio-frequency, but now they have succeeded in turning it into an amplifier. The built-in amplifier makes the device more sensitive to radio-frequency signals.
The radio frequencies that are hard to measure are closer to the quantum limit. One of the uses of the new measuring tool is to look for dark matter.
There is a heat pump.
The photon pressure circuit is made from inductors andCapacitors that are cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero. The temperature is very hot and they are excited with thermal energy. The researchers were able to cool the hot photons into their quantum ground state using photon pressure.
By sending an extra signal into the cold circuit, the authors are able to amplify the cold photon and heat them up. The extra signal pumped the photon in one direction between the two circuits. The researchers were able to cool the photons in one part of the circuit to a temperature that is colder than the other part by pushing them harder in one direction.
More information: Ines Corveira Rodrigues, Parametrically enhanced interactions and non-reciprocal bath dynamics in a photon-pressure Kerr amplifier, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq1690. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq1690 Journal information: Science Advances
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