Chilly Record! Coldest Object on Earth Created in Lab

[n2doc]

A chunk of copper became the coldest cubic meter (35.3 cubic feet) on Earth when researchers chilled it to 6 millikelvins, or six-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin).

This is the closest a substance of this mass and volume has ever come to absolute zero. Researchers put the 880-lb. (400 kilograms) copper cube inside a container called a cryostat that is specially designed to keep items extremely cold. This is the first cryostat built that is capable of keeping substances so close to absolute zero.

"The main difficulty of this project was the technological challenge of the cryostat," Carlo Bucci, a researcher at the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy who helped build the cryostat, told Live Science. "We spent 10 years designing, realizing and testing the system."

Building the extreme temperature cryostat is just the first step in a new experiment in which the cryostat will act as a particle detector. The setup for the experiment is called Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) and is being built at the INFN Gran Sasso underground lab. Bucci and a team of researchers hope the CUORE detector will reveal more about the subatomic particles called neutrinos and why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

more

http://www.livescience.com/48514-coldest-object-created.html

[krispos42]

1. Must have been a hollow cube

A solid meter of copper would weigh on the order of 8 tons.