Experimental schematic. Silica spheres are levitated in a dual-beam optical tweezer inside a vacuum chamber. Light of wavelength 1,064 nm is coupled into lenses from single-mode optical fibres, creating an optical trap. The motion of the levitated sphere is monitored with a camera and a QPD. Credit: (c) Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2014.82 Temperature measurements in our daily life are typically performed by bringing a thermometer in contact with the object to be measured. However, measuring the temperature of nanoscale objects is a much more tricky task due to their size – up to a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. Pioneering research, published in Nature Nanotechnology, has now developed a method to accurately measure the surface temperature of nanoscale objects when they have a different temperature than their environment. A team led by Dr Janet Anders at the University of Exeter and Professor Peter Barker at University College London have discovered that the surface temperatures of nanoscale objects can be determined from analysing their jittery movement in air – known as Brownian motion. “This motion is caused by the collisions with the air molecules” said Dr Anders, a quantum information theorist and member of the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of Exeter. “We found
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