First, if you can remove the thermal energy from an object, it becomes much more sensitive to outside perturbations. In addition, eliminating the distraction of an object's thermal motion allows scientists to finally see the motion that results from quantum energy, which is much more interesting. Scientists have been cooling atoms with lasers for several decades, but there was a limit to how cold they could get. “The limit of how cold you can make things by shining light on them was the bottleneck that was keeping people from getting colder and colder,” Teufel said. When the scientists tried again to cool their drum with squeezed light, they got it so that thermal motion was one-fifth the magnitude of quantum motion.

Source: Washington Post January 11, 2017 18:07 UTC