First optical refrigerator

optical what?

Solid state fridge

"Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has achieved a breakthrough in solid state cooling by demonstrating the first optical refrigerator showing for the first time, that a device other than fluorescent material can be cooled while fluorescence is occurring....

Ball Corporation is one of the world's leading suppliers of metal and plastic packaging to the beverage and food industries...."

Maybe we'll see an LEO pointing a flashlight at a suspect and barking: "Freeze!!" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

This sounds great!

Someone tell me if I've interpreted this right, as follows:

They took an aluminum cylinder, having a known temperature. On that Al cylinder was affixed (glued?) their special flourescent material thingy. This is like a patch of stuff. Then they shined a laser onto that patch of stuff and noted that they could get the Al cylinder 11 or so degrees cooler below ambient temp, just by shining laser light onto the flourescing patch attached to it.

So the enthalpy must be given off from the patch by the production of flourescing? And that causes the local area to cool? The energy lost is in the form of light?

That's really neat if so!!!

I can see the Lumilded's press release now:

"10W Luxeons cool themselves!"

Of course, being Lumileds, some Luxeons would cool themselves 2 or 3 degrees and other 15 or 20.

[ QUOTE ]
Saaby said:
Of course, being Lumileds, some Luxeons would cool themselves 2 or 3 degrees and other 15 or 20.

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL and you could order them based only on how much each weighs. Or some other irrelevant measure.

This would give new meaning to 'Color Temperature'. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/jpshakehead.gif

wow... imagine new sun screens that not only keep you from burning, but actually keep you from getting too hot. Only problem is you might not look too hot.

David <><