Comment Physics ignorant summary (Score 3, Interesting) 12
Heat is Brownian motion. The news here is that this was accomplished with laser cooling rather than cryogenically.
To quote from the abstract:
Here we use coherent scattering into a Fabry-Perot cavity to cool the megahertz-frequency librational mode of an optically levitated silica nanoparticle from room temperature to its quantum ground state.
This kind of cooling is much less energy intensive and opens up these kind of systems for further experiments and compact technological integration (hence the reference to sensors).