Physicists have created a "mysterious" material to study gravitational waves

Composite: NASA and Pixabay

There was a time when physics experiments could be done with two ballast balls and a tower in Pisa (although Galileo's famous experiment is most likely apocryphal). Nowadays, scientists need a rocket, a special Rubidium isotope, lasers and a few minutes of free fall in weightlessness to carry out their experiments. At least, that's what you need to create a Bose-Einstein condensate in the space.

The Bose-Einstein condensate is probably the most exotic state of matter yet discovered by scientists and it's very, very very difficult to produce. At its heart, a BEC is a set of atoms whose temperature has been lowered to an almost absolute zero. From there, atoms begin to condense into a unified structure, which acts as if it were a single atom. One of the potential applications for BEC is the creation of a sensor capable of capturing gravitational waves, but scientists still need to conduct experiments to fully understand what they are capable of.

The only problem is that Bose-Einstein condensates do not like gravity.

Under normal conditions, a BEC can be effectively studied only when it is in free fall from a tower, but this gives scientists a window of a fraction of a second at a time. This prompted scientists to try to create a BEC while it was in free fall, which would allow them to do a lot more research at one go. According to Phys.org:

"The device consisted of a capsule containing a chip containing a group of rubidium-87 atoms, electronics, lasers and a power source.It was activated when the rocket reached an altitude of 243 km, producing a BEC in just 1.6 seconds, the BEC was produced, 110 preprogrammed experiments were made within six minutes of the return of the rocket to Earth. "

To be clear, a Bose-Einstein condensate is very different from a Higgs-Boson particle (the odd little piece of matter that the large hadron collider is trying to study). The essential difference lies in the fact that the experiments conducted for a CEB are not likely to transform the Earth into a hyper-dense sphere the size of a football field.