The International Space Station has a compact laboratory, about the size of a small refrigerator, where some of the coldest things in the universe are manufactured. It’s called the Cold Atom Lab, and scientists have been using the chamber for some time to study the strange quantum properties of atoms in microgravity. But on Wednesday (November 15), they announced they had reached a milestone.
The Cold Atom Lab, remotely operated by a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, has formally produced a quantum gas containing two types of atoms. This could ultimately open the door to entirely new space-based experiments in quantum chemistry.
Matter can exist in five known states. Gases, liquids, solids, and plasmas are well-known, but there is also an exotic fifth state of matter. Bose-Einstein condensationit was first discovered in the 1990s.
This state of matter has not been found in nature, but scientists can create it. Bose-Einstein condensates are produced in ultracold laboratories such as the Cold Atom Lab. There, lasers and magnets help cool the atomic cloud to near absolute zero, or -459 degrees Fahrenheit (-273 degrees Celsius). It is the coldest possible temperature in the universe. In this state, the atoms slow down and their edges melt together, allowing scientists to observe quantum effects that are normally very difficult to study.
Related: Antimatter reacts to gravity as predicted by Einstein, confirmed by large-scale experiment at CERN
On Earth, gravity causes the Bose-Einstein condensate to dissipate when the cryogenic magnet or laser in the laboratory is shut off. However, this does not occur in the microgravity environment of space. In this way, scientists Create a Bose-Einstein condensate The first Cold Atom Lab laboratory was installed in 2018 when this chamber was installed on the ISS. and, many years after thatthey studied this phenomenon very effectively.
But now researchers have shown that such quantum gases can be created with not just one but two types of atoms. In this case, they used clouds of potassium rubidium to accomplish the feat. According to JPL announcementfuture research with this type of quantum gas could help develop space-based quantum technologies that already exist on Earth.
Nicholas Bigelow, a professor of physics and optics at the University of Rochester, said, “You can make sensors that are very sensitive to small rotations, essentially making a gyroscope using cold atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate.” I can do that.” statement. He is a co-author of the new discovery.
“These gyroscopes could provide a fixed reference point in space that could be used for deep space navigation,” Bigelow said. “We’re also developing a number of things that could lead to improvements in space clocks, which are important to so many things in modern life, such as high-speed internet and GPS.”
Researchers also believe that future experiments at the Cold Atom Laboratory could help test the equivalence principle, which is central to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This principle holds that gravity must affect all objects in the same way, regardless of their mass. In other words, the feather and the brick should fall at the same speed, at least in a frictionless vacuum.
Scientists have struggled to solve this principle using the following law: quantum mechanics, explains how the smallest known objects in the universe behave. Quantum experiments in space might be able to test that more precisely.
A paper detailing these findings was published in the journal Nature on November 15th.