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For the first time in history, an international team of physicists has managed to produce the strange state of matter known as Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in space. In their new article, physicists discuss the rocket launched in space with a tiny device that they created in order to perform experiments with the rocket in free fall.
A Bose-Einstein condensate is created by taking gas atoms with an extremely low density, then cooling them very close to absolute zero (technically to a billionth of a degree). With temperatures as low as these, atoms begin to behave strangely and transform into a single macroscopic quantum wave, turning them into a strange state of matter. And like Scientific Magazine According to reports, German physicists have managed to produce such a BEC in the space.
Physicists have chosen to carry out their experiments in space because, unlike lab work, the space has no gravity. To be studied, a BEC must normally be removed from its trap of electromagnetic fields and light and in a vacuum chamber it would fall to the ground in a fraction of a second, making it extremely difficult to examine.
However, at the bottom of the space, this problem does not exist, since a Bose-Einstein condensate is released, it can simply float without having to attack the gravity, which allows the physicists to carry out experiments that could never be conducted in the confines of a camera. laboratory. These experiences also include very interesting things, like learning more about its quantum nature by creating BEC bubbles.
A team of German physicists has produced Bose-Einstein condensate in space. Here's what it means for physics research. #science #space #physics #research material # #job #nature #Universe https://t.co/tk7wYLlvhF
– Times and Tech (@TimesandTech) October 19, 2018
To produce this strange state of matter, physicists undertook the creation of an automated processing apparatus containing a chip containing 87 rubidium atoms, lasers, a power source and electronic components trapped at l & # 39; inside. The platform was then attached to a rocket launched January 23, 2017 in Sweden and carried within a radius of 150 miles. Physicists managed to create a BEC in just 1.6 seconds and performed their experiments during the six-minute zero gravity period as the rocket landed on Earth. This included 110 beautifully different preprogrammed measures.
While US physicists launched NASA's Cold Atom Lab in May for the Bose-Einstein condensate study, Germany won the race to create the first BEC in space. However, between the Cold Atom laboratory and the new interesting results from Germany, physicists will learn more than they ever dreamed of doing with this state of the art.
The new study on Bose-Einstein condensate created in space has been published in the Nature.
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