Abstract
The importance of temperature is very often not fully recognized, the reason probably being that our life is restricted to an extremely narrow range of temperatures. This can be realized if we look at the temperatures existing in nature or accessible in laboratories (Fig. 1.1). These temperatures range from about 109 K, the temperature at the centre of the hottest stars and necessary to form or destroy atomic nuclei, to 2.10−6 K, the lowest temperatures accessible today in the laboratory in condensed matter physics experiments. This lower limit means that we have been able to refrigerate matter to within two microkelvin of absolute zero (0K = −273.15° C). Indeed, nuclei have been investigated at nuclear-spin temperatures which are another four orders of magnitude lower, to below the nanokelvin temperature range. With these achievements, low-temperature physics has surpassed nature by several orders of magnitude, because the lowest temperature in nature and in the universe is 2.73 K. This background temperature exists everywhere in the universe because of the photon energy which is still being radiated from the “big bang”. If we compare low-temperature physics to other branches of physics, we realize that it is actually one of the very few branches of science where mankind has surpassed nature, an achievement which has not yet proved possible, for example, in high-pressure physics, high-energy physics or vacuum physics.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Pobell, F. (1996). Introduction. In: Matter and Methods at Low Temperatures. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03225-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03225-1_1
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