I don’t believe there is anything that can’t be improved by adding a laser to it. And now a group of intrepid engineers has proven me right by making an oscilloscope. An oscilloscope with lasers.

Of course, not everyone shares my obsession with lasers—such people are strange and have sad little lives, but we forgive them. But it’s a fair question to ask why we should bother adding lasers to oscilloscopes given that they are pretty well-established tech. The answer is speed. An oscilloscope is designed to display changes in voltage or current with respect to time. To do this, the oscilloscope needs to sample the voltage faster than it changes, which is problematic for today’s modern, high-frequency electronics, where it’s often easier to generate fast changes than it is to measure them.

This is where a laser may have some benefit. In principle, a light field can be modulated at a rate that is a large fraction of its base frequency (~600THz). Provided we can measure that modulation, we can measure time-varying voltages much faster than we could using any electronic method. But therein lies a conundrum: how do we measure the modulation of a light field? Using electrons. And what is the problem with electrons? They are too damn slow.

I often get enthusiastic about Bose Einstein condensates, fascinating materials where large groups of atoms show collective quantum behavior. The thing that really gets me going is the process used to make ’em. The main step is something called optical cooling. It may sound very simple, but in reality it is difficult and mostly doesn’t work.

A recent paper in Physical Review Letters now adds a new optical cooling method to the physicist’s range of tools. In doing so, this opens up a whole lot of new and exciting possibilities.

Like, just cool off dude

The typical optical cooling method is an exceptionally neat bit of physics. Think about a gas of atoms. They are having a fantastic time in life’s mosh pit, flying in all directions and bouncing off one another with vim and vigor. But as with all good things in life, some old dude will turn up, complain about the noise, and generally suck all the entertainment out of life—everything just slows down. Slowing everything down is the easiest way to think of cooling.