NASA’s Cold Atom Lab on the International Space Station (ISS) has made a discovery that could change the course of quantum research. Researchers in this lab have experimented with gas to create an exotic material. When gas was cooled to nearly absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit or -273 degrees Celsius), it formed small, round blobs. According to a NASA article, the formation of these bubbles is similar to that of egg yolks with thin eggshells. A hollow sphere is formed by ultracold atomic gas bubbles. The largest bubbles are about one millimetre in diameter and one micron thick (one thousandth of a millimetre or 0.00004 inches).
NASA’s Cold Atom Lab is the International Space Station’s first quantum physics facility. Astronauts were not required to assist with the experiment. The lab is a vacuum-sealed chamber about the size of a minifridge. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) researchers remotely controlled the magnetic fields in the lab to manipulate the gas into different shapes. Scientists took atom samples and cooled them to “within a millionth of a degree above absolute zero” for the experiment.
On May 18, the study was published in the journal Nature.
“These are not your average soap bubbles,” said David Aveline, the study’s lead author and a member of NASA’s JPL’s Cold Atom Lab science team in Southern California. Nothing in nature can get as cold as the atomic gases produced in Cold Atom Lab. So we begin with this one-of-a-kind gas and investigate how it behaves when shaped into fundamentally different geometries. And, historically, when a material is manipulated in this way, very interesting physics and new applications can emerge.”
“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,” said Nathan Lundblad, the study’s principal investigator. Lundblad is a physics professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. The new study will aid researchers in their investigation of the quantum nature of matter.
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