Karlsruhe Dilatometer (IMAGE)

Rice University

Karlsruhe Dilatometer

Caption

Physicists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology used this capacitive dilatometer to measure the thermal expansion in cerium copper gold alloys cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero with a precision of one tenth of a trillionth of a meter, or approximately one-thousandth the radius of single atom. The precise thermal expansion measurements allowed the researchers to map out the stress dependence of entropy in materials as they were cooled to the point of a quantum phase transition.

Credit

K. Grube/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

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