Physicists in Germany have used a laser to cool a micron-sized cantilever from room temperature to 18 Kelvin, and it may be possible to reach sub-millikelvin temperatures with the same technique in the future. Constanze Höhberger Metzger and Khaled Karrai of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich exploited a photothermal force generated inside a cavity formed by the cantilever and a gold-coated optical fibre (Nature 432 1002).
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