I must have missed something. . . . "Below absolute zero is HOTTER than the same system at any positive temperature?????"
I know advanced calculus has been my foible in physics, but WTF??
Note that this doesn't mean the resulting system is actually cold, however. Nothing can be colder than absolute zero, which is a theoretical state at which particles have no energy at all. On the contrary, a system with a sub-zero absolute temperature is actually hotter than the same system at any positive temperature – a perverse result of how absolute temperature has been defined.
Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. “It’s interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab,” he says. “This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely.”
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