Your opponent's serve was almost perfect, but you vigorously returned it beyond his outstretched racquet to win the point. Now the tennis ball sits wedged in the chain‐link fence around the court. What happened to the ball's kinetic energy? It has gone to heat the fence, of course, and you realize that if the fence were quite a bit colder, you might be able to measure that heat and determine just how energetic your swing really was.

1.
For reviews of the class of spectrometers called low‐temperature detectors (of which calorimeters are one type) and of many of the applications discussed in the introductory portions of this article, see
N.
Booth
,
B.
Cabrera
,
E.
Fiorini
,
Annu. Rev. Nucl. Particle Sci.
46
,
471
(
1996
)
and
D.
Twerenbold
,
Rep. Prog. Phys.
59
,
349
(
1996
*.
2.
T.
Shutt
et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett.
69
,
3425
(
1992
).
3.
G. C.
Hilton
et al.,
Nature
391
,
672
(
1998
).
4.
E.
Fiorini
,
T. O.
Niinikoski
,
Nucl. Instrum. Methods
224
,
83
(
1984
).
5.
D. McCammon, M. Juda, D. D. Reeder, R. L. Kelley, S. H. Moseley, A. E. Szymkowiak, in Neutrino Mass and Low Energy Weak Interactions: Telemark, 1984,
V. Barger, D. Cline, eds., World Scientific, Singapore (1985), p. 329.
6.
B.
Cabrera
,
R. M.
Clarke
,
P.
Colling
,
A. J.
Miller
,
S.
Nam
,
R. W.
Romani
,
Appl. Phys. Lett.
73
,
735
(
1998
).
7.
S. H.
Moseley
,
J. C.
Mather
,
D.
McCammon
,
J. Appl. Phys.
56
,
1257
(
1984
).
8.
J. C.
Mather
,
Appl. Opt.
21
,
1125
(
1982
).
J. C.
Mather
,
Appl. Opt.
23
,
584
(
1984
).
9.
B. I. Shklovskii, A. L. Efros, Electronic Properties of Doped Semiconductors Springer‐Verlag, Berlin (1984).
10.
J.
Zhang
et al.,
Phys. Rev. B
57
,
4472
(
1998
).
N.
Wang
,
F. C.
Wellstood
,
B.
Sadoulet
,
E. E.
Haller
,
J.
Beeman
,
Phys. Rev. B
,
41
,
3761
(
1990
).
11.
S. I.
Han
et al.,
Proc. SPIE
3445
,
640
(
1998
).
12.
A.
Zehnder
,
Phys. Rev. B
52
,
12858
(
1995
). This paper approaches the problem from the perspective of optimizing superconducting tunnel junctions, for which the quasiparticle current is measured before complete thermalization occurs, but the paper's overview of the thermalization process is relevant to calorimeters with superconducting absorbers.
13.
W. J.
Skocpol
,
M. R.
Beasley
,
M.
Tinkham
,
J. Appl. Phys.
45
,
4054
(
1974
).
14.
K. D.
Irwin
,
Appl. Phys. Lett.
66
,
1998
(
1995
).
This content is only available via PDF.
You do not currently have access to this content.