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New Method uses Heat Flow to Levitate variety of objects

Vacuum chamber

UChicago researchers achieved levitation of macroscopic objects between warm and cold plates in a vacuum chamber. Credit: Chicago Jean Lachat

UChicago undergraduate physics students helped take the levitation science to a new level. 3rd-year Frankie Fung and 4th-year Mykhaylo Usatyuk led a team of UChicago researchers who demonstrated how to levitate a variety of objects – ceramic and polyethylene spheres, glass bubbles, ice particles, lint strands and thistle seeds – between a warm plate and a cold plate in a vacuum chamber. “They made lots of intriguing observations that blew my mind,” said Prof. Cheng Chin, whose ultracold lab in the Gordon Center for Integrative Science was home to the experiments.

In their work, researchers achieved a number of levitation breakthroughs, in terms of du...

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