Bose-Einstein condensates Archives

Despite decades of ongoing research, scientists are trying to understand how the four fundamental forces of the Universe fit together. Whereas quantum mechanics can explain how three of these forces things work together on the smallest of scales (electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces), General Relativity explains how things behaves on the largest of scales (i.e. gravity). In this respect, gravity remains the holdout.

To understand how gravity interacts with matter on the tiniest of scales, scientists have developed some truly cutting-edge experiments. One of these is NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), located aboard the ISS, which recently achieved a milestone by creating clouds of atoms known as Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). This was the first time that BECs have been created in orbit, and offers new opportunities to probe the laws of physics.

Originally predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein 71 years ago, BECs are essentially ultracold atoms that reach temperatures just above absolute zero, the point at which atoms should stop moving entirely (in theory). These particles are long-lived and precisely controlled, which makes them the ideal platform for studying quantum phenomena.

*The Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), which consists of two standardized containers that will be installed on the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Tyler Winn*

This is the purpose of the CAL facility, which is to study ultracold quantum gases in a microgravity environment. The laboratory was installed in the US Science Lab aboard the ISS in late May and is the first of its kind in space. It is designed to advance scientists’ ability to make precision measurements of gravity and study how it interacts with matter at the smallest of scales.

As Robert Thompson, the CAL project scientist and a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained in a recent press release:

“Having a BEC experiment operating on the space station is a dream come true. It’s been a long, hard road to get here, but completely worth the struggle, because there’s so much we’re going to be able to do with this facility.”

About two weeks ago, CAL scientists confirmed that the facility had produced BECs from atoms of rubidium – a soft, silvery-white metallic element in the alkali group. According to their report, they had reached temperatures as low as 100 nanoKelvin, one-ten million of one Kelvin above absolute zero (-273 °C; -459 °F). This is roughly 3 K (-270 °C; -454 °F) colder than the average temperature of space.

Because of their unique behavior, BECs are characterized as a fifth state of matter, distinct from gases, liquids, solids and plasma. In BECs, atoms act more like waves than particles on the macroscopic scale, whereas this behavior is usually only observable on the microscopic scale. In addition, the atoms all assume their lowest energy state and take on the same wave identity, making them indistinguishable from one another.

*The”physics package” inside the Cold Atom Lab, where ultracold clouds of atoms called Bose-Einstein condensates are produced. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Tyler Winn*

In short, the atom clouds begin to behave like a single “super atom” rather than individual atoms, which makes them easier to study. The first BECs were produced in a lab in 1995 by a science team consisting of Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their accomplishment. Since that time, hundreds of BEC experiments have been conducted on Earth and some have even been sent into space aboard sounding rockets.

But the CAL facility is unique in that it is the first of its kind on the ISS, where scientists can conduct daily studies over long periods. The facility consists of two standardized containers, which consist of the larger “quad locker” and the smaller “single locker”. The quad locker contains CAL’s physics package, the compartment where CAL will produce clouds of ultra-cold atoms.

This is done by using magnetic fields or focused lasers to create frictionless containers known as “atom traps”. As the atom cloud decompresses inside the atom trap, its temperature naturally drops, getting colder the longer it remains in the trap. On Earth, when these traps are turned off, gravity causes the atoms to begin moving again, which means they can only be studied for fractions of a second.

Aboard the ISS, which is a microgravity environment, BECs can decompress to colder temperatures than with any instrument on Earth and scientists are able to observe individual BECs for five to ten seconds at a time and repeat these measurements for up to six hours per day. And since the facility is controlled remotely from the Earth Orbiting Missions Operation Center at JPL, day-to-day operations require no intervention from astronauts aboard the station.

JPL scientists and members of the Cold Atom Lab’s atomic physics team (left to right) David Aveline, Ethan Elliott and Jason Williams. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Robert Shotwell, the chief engineer of JPL’s astronomy and physics directorate, has overseen the project since February 2017. As he indicated in a recent NASA press release:

“CAL is an extremely complicated instrument. Typically, BEC experiments involve enough equipment to fill a room and require near-constant monitoring by scientists, whereas CAL is about the size of a small refrigerator and can be operated remotely from Earth. It was a struggle and required significant effort to overcome all the hurdles necessary to produce the sophisticated facility that’s operating on the space station today.”

Looking ahead, the CAL scientists want to go even further and achieve temperatures that are lower than anything achieved on Earth. In addition to rubidium, the CAL team is also working towards making BECSs using two different isotopes of potassium atoms. At the moment, CAL is still in a commissioning phase, which consists of the operations team conducting a long series of tests see how the CAL facility will operate in microgravity.

However, once it is up and running, five science groups – including groups led by Cornell and Ketterle – will conduct experiments at the facility during its first year. The science phase is expected to begin in early September and will last three years. As Kamal Oudrhiri, JPL’s mission manager for CAL, put it:

“There is a globe-spanning team of scientists ready and excited to use this facility. The diverse range of experiments they plan to perform means there are many techniques for manipulating and cooling the atoms that we need to adapt for microgravity, before we turn the instrument over to the principal investigators to begin science operations.”

Given time, the Cold Atom Lab (CAL) may help scientists to understand how gravity works on the tiniest of scales. Combined with high-energy experiments conducted by CERN and other particle physics laboratories around the world, this could eventually lead to a Theory of Everything (ToE) and a complete understanding of how the Universe works.

And be sure to check out this cool video (no pun!) of the CAL facility as well, courtesy of NASA:

Further Reading: NASA

Canadians don’t have much to be proud of, but we can regale you with our ability to withstand freezing cold temperatures. Now, I live on the West Coast, so I’m soft and weak, rarely experiencing temperatures below freezing.

But for some of my Canadian brethren, temperatures can dip down to levels your mind and body can scarcely comprehend. For example, I have a friend who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. For a day last winter, the temperatures there dipped down -31C, but with the windchill, it felt like -50C. On that same day, it was a balmy -29C on Mars. On Mars!

But for scientists, and the Universe, it can get much much colder. So cold, in fact, that they use a completely different temperature scale – Kelvin – to measure how far away things are from the coldest possible temperature: Absolute Zero.

Nowhere close to absolute zero. Credit: Osccarr (CC BY 2.0)

On the Celsius scale, Absolute Zero is -273.15 degrees. And in Fahrenheit, it’s -459.67 degrees. In the Kelvin scale, however, it’s very simple. Absolute Zero is 0 kelvin.

At this point, a science explainer is going to stumble into a minefield of incorrect usage. It’s not 0 degrees kelvin, you don’t say the degrees part, just the kelvin part. Just kelvin.

This is because when you measure something from an arbitrary point, like the direction you just turned, you’ve changed course 15-degrees. But if you’re measuring from an absolute point, like the lowest physical temperature defined by nature, you drop the degrees because it’s an absolute. An Absolute Zero.

Of course, I’ve probably gotten that wrong too. This stuff is hard.

Anyway, back to Absolute Zero.

Still not cold enough. Credit: Lori Cuthbert (CC BY 2.0)

Absolute Zero is the coldest possible temperature that can theoretically be reached. At this point, no heat energy can be extracted from a system, no work can be done. It’s dead Jim.

But it’s completely theoretical. It’s practically impossible to cool something down to Absolute Zero. In order to cool something down, you need to do work to extract heat from it. The colder you get, the more work you need to do. In order to get to Absolute Zero, you’d need to put in an infinite amount of work. And that’s ridiculous.

As you probably learned in physics or chemistry class, the temperature of a gas translates to the motion of the particles in the gas. As you cool a gas down, by extracting heat from it, the particles slow down.

You would think, then, that by cooling something down to Absolute Zero, all particle motion in that something would stop. But that’s not true.

From a quantum mechanics point of view, you can never know the position and momentum of particles at the same time. If the particles stopped, you’d know their momentum (zero) and their position… right there. The Universe and its laws of physics just can’t allow that to happen. Thank Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Therefore, there’s always a little motion, even if you could get to Absolute Zero, which you can’t. But you can’t extract any more heat from it.

The physicist Robert Boyle was one of the first to consider the possibility that there was a lowest possible temperature, which he called the primum frigidum. In 1702, Guillaume Amontons created a thermometer that he calculated would bottom out at -240 C. Pretty close, actually.

But it was Lord Kelvin, who created this absolute scale in 1848, starting at -273 C, or 0 kelvin.

By this measurement, even with its windchill, Winnipeg was a balmy 223 kelvin on that wintry day.

The surface of Pluto, on the other hand varies from a low of 33 kelvin to a high of 55 kelvin. That’s -240 C to -218 C.

The average background temperature across the entire Universe is just 2.7 kelvin. You won’t find many places that cold, unless you get out to the vast cosmic voids that separate galaxy clusters.

Over time, the background temperature of the Universe will continue to drop, but it’ll never actually reach Absolute Zero. Even in a Googol years, when the last supermassive black hole has finally evaporated, and there’s no usable heat left in the entire Universe.

In fact, astronomers call this bleak future the “heat death” of the Universe. It’s heat death, as in, the death of all heat. And happiness.

You might be surprised to know that the coldest temperature in the entire Universe is right here on Earth. Well, sometimes, anyway. And assuming the aliens haven’t got better technology than us, which they probably do.

At the time that I’m recording this video, physicists have used lasers to cool down Rubidium-87 gas to just 170 nanokelvin, a tiny fraction above Absolute Zero. In fact, they won a Nobel Prize for their work in discovering Bose-Einstein condensates.

NASA is actually working on a new experiment called the Cold Atom Lab that will send a version of this technology to the International Space Station, where it should be able to cool material down to 100 picokelvin. That’s cold.

The Cold Atom Lab is planned to launch in August 2017. Credit: NASA / JPL

Here are your takeaways. Absolute Zero is the coldest possible temperature than can ever be reached, the point at which no further heat energy can be extracted from a system. Never say degrees kelvin, you’ll cause so much wincing. The Universe can’t match our cold generating abilities… yet. Take that Universe.

I’d love to hear the coldest temperature you’ve ever personally experienced. For me, it was visiting Buffalo in December. That’s not right.

Tag: Bose-Einstein condensates

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