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May '08, the lowest temperature ever reached is 10^-10 K.

See related link for more information about the Nova Program.

At the Low Temperature Lab at the Helsinki University of Technology on August 12, 2000, they cooled a piece of rhodium metal to 100 pK, or 100,000 nK, or 100 trillionths of a degree above absolute 0.

The lowest temperature a gas of *fermions* has been cooled to is 50 nK (50,000 pK), creating the first fermionic condensate, which is another state of matter like Bose-Einstein condensate, solid, liquid, and gas. This was accomplished with sodium-40, an isotope with half-integer spin, thus making it *fermionic*, so it obeys the Pauli-Exclusion Principle, which is why it's such a feat to get the atoms cold enough for their de Broglie wavelengths to be comparable to their average separation distances from each other. You'll note the temperature is relatively high compared to the above temperatures - the reason is that the repulsive force from the atoms not wanting to be in the same ground energy level makes it more difficult for scientists to cool them.

The lowest temperature a macroscopic (relatively large) object has been cooled to is 0.8 K on April 8 2007 at MIT. The object was a massive whole gram, versus above, where we're talking about hundreds or thousands of mere atoms.

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14y ago

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