The 'Coolest Experiment in the Universe' - NASA’s Cold Atom Lab

The search for ever colder temperatures has been a major theme of physics for over a century, leading to breakthroughs like the discovery of superfluidity and superconductivity, along with the development of laser cooling techniques. NASA’s Cold Atom Lab (CAL)  will produce clouds of ultra-cold atoms aboard the International Space Station to perform quantum physics experiments in microgravity. Atoms are chilled to about 10 billion times colder than the average temperature of deep space. They behave in strange ways at such temperatures, allowing scientists to investigate the fundamental nature of matter. Research done on CAL can also have practical applications, such as making improvements to atomic clock technologies, which are used in spacecraft navigation, as well as the GPS satellites that provide navigation information to smartphones. The research could also lead to improvements to quantum sensors used for remote sensing on spacecraft.

Transcript

00:00:00 [ ♪ ] Kamal Oudrhiri: Roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. About 27% makes up dark matter. So all we know is less than 5%. 95% of what surrounds us continues to be a mystery. Robert Shotwell: One of the ways that we get smarter is to try to build better instruments. And the Cold Atom Laboratory is one of those instruments. So the Cold Atom Laboratory's intended to provide one of the most sensitive instruments mankind's ever built.

00:00:40 That instrument is based around a Bose-Einstein condensate. Jim Kohel: A Bose-Einstein condensate is a unique quantum state of matter, which we can only obtain at the coldest temperatures and very high densities. It is actually a macroscopic ensemble of atoms that you can view with a camera and these wispy clouds of atoms behave in very strange ways. They're no longer distinguishable as an individual particle.

00:01:13 You really have to describe it more like atoms acting collectively as a wave. Shotwell: So the quest to getting colder and colder temperatures, really that's to get a higher fidelity instrument. Basically, the colder you can get matter and reduce the amount of vibrations and other things that they normally do, you can start using them as more sensitive instruments to test other theories and understand physics

00:01:39 at a more fundamental level. Rob Thompson: It's not just lower temperatures, but it's also the fact that we want to study atoms. And we want to look at them for really long periods of time. And that is really only possible in microgravity. David Aveline: On the Earth we have a limited amount of time once you let go of the atoms or weaken them that they will fall out of your trap and run into the, you know, limits of your experiment. So, when we get to a microgravity environment

00:02:08 we can get to these long interrogation times in space. Shotwell: Once we get on orbit and into a microgravity environment, we'll be able to achieve temperatures never physically manifested before. So we will make the coldest spot in the universe by creating Bose-Einstein condensates and then further cooling them, even beyond the B-EC realm. Oudrhiri: The ultra-sensitive atoms in the Cold Atom Laboratory

00:02:35 have the potential to unlock many mysteries beyond the frontiers of the known universe. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology