14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists with the University of Adelaide in Australia have successfully created a brand-new thermometer that, if invented earlier, would have probably turned Katy Perry's “Hot N Cold” into a much more complex song.
The thermometer comprises two wavelengths of light, i.e. red and green, injected into a crystalline disk, Phys Org tells us. Depending on the temperature of the crystal, these two colors of light travel at different speeds.
“When we heat up the crystal we find that the red light slows down by a tiny amount with respect to the green light,” explains Professor Andre Luiten.
“By forcing the light to circulate thousands of times around the edge of this disk, we can measure this minuscule difference in speed with great precision,” he further details.
This innovative thermometer is argued to be so sensitive that it is able to pin down differences in temperature with a precision of up to 30 billionths of a degree.
Apparently, this makes it three times more precise than any of the other best thermometers that the scientific community has until now created and made use of.
“To emphasize how precise this is, when we examine the temperature of an object we find that it is always fluctuating,” Professor Andre Luiten with the University of Adelaide says.
Furthermore, “We all knew that if you looked closely enough you find that all the atoms in any material are always jiggling about, but we actually see this unceasing fluctuation with our thermometer, showing that the microscopic world is always in motion.”
The researcher and his colleagues expect that, at some point in the future, their thermometer will serve to advance research in fields where even the slightest variation in temperature can make a world of a difference.