Yep! To both I think? I remember back in like 2021 there was a paper where some team used lasers to induce radiation pressure in a beam of hydrogen and got it to cool down significantly, but I don’t remember if they reached or were shooting for absolute 0. My napkin plan was thinking more along the lines of “optical vortex --> optical tweezers --> OAM molecules in the trajectory out of the way” rather than cooling them down. I’m pretty sure optical tweezers have only been achieved in close range lab conditions manipulating a very small number of particles, so the idea of doing it on enough particles to create a flight path and also at the distance you’d want to fire a projectile is probably unhinged
Aren’t they already using lasers to cool down the hydrogen? Or maybe I’m just thinking of atomic cooling for absolute zero experiments.
Yep! To both I think? I remember back in like 2021 there was a paper where some team used lasers to induce radiation pressure in a beam of hydrogen and got it to cool down significantly, but I don’t remember if they reached or were shooting for absolute 0. My napkin plan was thinking more along the lines of “optical vortex --> optical tweezers --> OAM molecules in the trajectory out of the way” rather than cooling them down. I’m pretty sure optical tweezers have only been achieved in close range lab conditions manipulating a very small number of particles, so the idea of doing it on enough particles to create a flight path and also at the distance you’d want to fire a projectile is probably unhinged