A Physicist Made the Fifth State of Matter at Home, but at Least You Wore Pants Today
A researcher has used remote controls to make a Bose-Einstein Condensate from her home.
The condensate is key to applications like quantum computing and atom lasers.
Amruta Gadge's lab set up everything they needed just ahead lockdown.
In a move that puts the rest of remote workers to shame for the remainder of the quarantine, a researcher from the University of Sussex has made a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) from her living room.
Amruta Gadge, a research fellow in the university’s Quantum Systems and Devices Laboratory (QSDL), exercised patience and creative thinking as she walked remotely through the complex process without the support applications she’s used to in the lab.
Like the scientists in Italy’s Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) experiment, the researchers in the Quantum Systems and Devices Laboratory are scrambling to make backup plans to keep their work going. But where CUORE is able to send one person once in a while, QSDL has been virtually empty during lockdown.
“The research team has been observing lockdown and working from home and so we have not been able to access our labs for weeks,” Gadge said in a university statement.
Working with remote controls, Gadge prepared a rubidium gas “cloud” that she cooled to very near absolute zero using lasers and radio waves.
“We use multiple carefully timed steps of laser and radio wave cooling to prepare rubidium gases at these ultralow temperatures,” experimental physics professor Peter Krüger said in the statement. “This requires accurate computer control of laser light, magnets and electric currents in microchips based on vigilant monitoring of environmental conditions in the lab while nobody is able to be there to check in person.”
Laser cooling is often a matter of slowing atoms by suspending their motion within an oncoming laser beam. In this way, scientists can reach “nanokelvin” temperature levels and do experimental work that’s not possible at anything even a little closer to room temperature.
These cold atoms are trapped, and any less useful extra atoms are allowed to escape, leaving highly dense, near-absolute-zero atoms in condensate form. All the atoms must match, which is why allowing incompatible atoms to leave is so critical. Once that happens, you’re left with an atom cloud that acts as one “quantum object.”
Scientists have studied BECs for decades now, but applications remain mostly hypothetical. The Institute of Physics wrote in the 2000s that atom lasers “could be used holographically to ‘paint’ integrated circuits at the nano scale, while interferometers based on atom lasers could provide a new method of making precision measurements,” but stressed that “a working atom laser is still a way off yet.”
Being able to generate a BEC using remote tools and supervision has implications for the future of this exciting research. Researchers could send prepared experiments on unmanned spacecraft and control them remotely, for example.
“Enhancing the capabilities of remote lab control is relevant for research applications aimed at operating quantum technology in inaccessible environments such as space, underground, in a submarine, or in extreme climates,” Krüger said in the statement.
And more prosaically, this means researchers could send their experiments along on journeys that just don’t have any postdocs or professors on board. With care, their work could be maintained in transit and delivered safely.
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