Hot and Cold, All at Once

New research slated for publication in Physical Review B shows that "cold spots" can be localized within a molecule, leaving single atoms with temperatures near absolute zero, while other parts of the molecule rest around a comparatively balmy 100 Kelvin.Ordinarily, temperature is a measure of the collective kinetic energy of a multitude of molecules, so talking about it on the quantum scale becomes a bit hairy--instead of having to do with the energy of the molecules themselves, sub-molecular t...