In March 2018, researchers launched what looked like a large white refrigerator to the International Space Station. That heavy box contains a $100 million facility called the Cold Atom Laboratory, which allows a series of atomic physics experiments to be performed at freezing temperatures in g-space. With those unique conditions, scientists have now created tiny bubbles of extremely cold gaseous atoms, bringing them to the edge of quantum physics territory.
That achievement, achievable only in microgravity and at a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, the minimum temperature of the universe, would be unattainable on Earth. The team of physicists behind this milestone, all of whom are working remotely – i.e. on the ground – have published their new study in the journal Nature. Nature last week, showed that they had created extremely cold bubbles with an experimental apparatus that beamed lasers into a sealed vacuum chamber to cool gaseous atoms. They then deployed magnetic fields and radio waves to mold them into egg-shaped hollow blobs. The experiment gives insight into the quantum field and has applications to other areas of physics as well.
David Aveline, an author of the study and member of the collaboration working on Cold Atom Laboratoryoperated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Super cold atom The gas – in this case, rubidium – doesn’t behave the way they normally do at room temperature, coiling around their container like microscopic billiard balls. As gases cool, they move slower and slower, but without the sluggish atoms turning into liquids or solids, like vapors. As they are cooled to near absolute zero, they begin to clump together, and the wavelengths associated with the gas particles get longer and begin to overlap.
At such extremely cold temperatures, atoms begin to behave strangely. They combine to form a substance with quantum properties that act both like particles and like waves. They are essentially a quantum paradox and almost like a new state of matter, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, named after Indian and German physicists a century ago. before. (Technically, ultracold atoms need to be cooled further to be considered Bose-Einstein condensates, but they show signs of being at the peak of that.) In any case, while the phenomena Quantum objects often require a powerful microscope to observe, these bubbles can be inflated to a size much larger than the width of a human hair.
“We’re using neat physical effects that usually happen at the atomic scale, and we’re making them happen in objects up to a millimeter in size, trying to make quantum mechanics and strange physical behavior visible to the naked eye, said Nathan Lundblad, an atomic physicist at Bates University in Maine and lead author of the study.
This research could have applications beyond the world of quantum physics. One reason NASA is interested is because such research on supercooled atoms could eventually aid in the development of more accurate gyroscopes and accelerometers, Aveline said. Inflating bubbles of supercooled atoms could also provide insight into the superfast expansion of the subuniverse just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
