Here's a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.
From mining dust to cooling light to startup hub rankings, here's some quick-read news from across Imperial.
Cool light
Researchers have been surprised to find a curious interaction between scattered light and sound waves can have a cooling effect.
In experiments, researchers directed light into a glass microsphere - only four times wider than a human hair - that traps both light and high-frequency sound waves by continually reflecting them around its circumference.
They found that as photons of light were scattered by soundwaves within the sphere, the temperature dropped until no more photons were observed.
Kyle Major from the Quantum Measurement Lab in Imperial's Department of Physics, who was co-first author of the research paper, said: "Using zero-photon detection to help cool quantum systems into their ground state will help with the development of quantum computers and quantum networks, as well as testing the fundamental laws of physics."
