While the temperature inside the International Space Station (ISS) is a pleasant 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), there is a small room onboard that is much, much colder - colder than space itself.
Scientists have successfully blown small, spherical gas bubbles cooled to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero in NASA's Cold Atom Lab aboard the International Space Station, the lowest temperature theoretically attainable. (That's a couple of degrees below zero!) The purpose of the experiment was to see how ultracold gas behaved in microgravity, and the findings could lead to studies with Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), the fifth state of matter.
In microgravity, gas, like liquid, coalesces into spheres, according to the test. Similar tests on Earth have failed due to gravity pulling materials into uneven droplets.
"These aren't your typical soap bubbles," said David Aveline, the study's lead author and a member of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California's Cold Atom Lab science team (opens in new tab). "We know of nothing in nature that gets as cold as the atomic vapours created in Cold Atom Lab."
"So we start with this one-of-a-kind gas and look at how it reacts when sculpted into fundamentally different geometries," Aveline explained. "And, in the past, manipulating a material in this way has resulted in highly interesting physics as well as novel applications."
To conduct more quantum physics research, the team hopes to convert the ultracold gas bubbles into the BEC state, which can only exist at extremely low temperatures.
In the same statement, Nathan Lundblad, a physics professor at Bates College in Maine and the principal investigator of the new study, said, "Some theoretical work suggests that if we work with one of these bubbles that is in the BEC state, we might be able to form vortices — basically, little whirlpools — in the quantum material." "That's an example of a physical configuration that could help us better comprehend BEC qualities and obtain a better understanding of quantum matter's nature."
Such investigations are only possible in the Cold Atom Lab's microgravity, which consists of a vacuum chamber about the size of a minifridge. It was deployed on the ISS in 2018 and is controlled remotely by a team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"Our major goal with Cold Atom Lab is fundamental research - we want to examine the quantum basis of matter using the unique space environment of the space station," said Jason Williams, a project scientist for the Cold Atom Lab at JPL. "A excellent example of that is studying ultracold atoms in novel geometries."
The findings were published in the journal Nature on May 18th.
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