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Last year, graduate student Dennis Becker observed from a shelter that the MAIUS-1 sounding rocket was taking off from a launch facility in the Swedish Arctic. But even after repeated delays due to snow and wind, it will not be a few days before the rocket's payload has survived. When the ambitious experiment returned to Earth after six hours spent in space, six clouds made recovery by helicopter impossible, and the project spent several days in the Swedish tundra, where temperatures dropped to -30 degrees Celsius.
Despite the harsh conditions, the mission was a success. For six minutes, the MAIUS-1 team managed to create the first Bose-Einstein condensate based in the space, a gas of ultra-cold atoms, so cold that they start to demonstrate strange quantum effects on a macroscopic scale. The team is now publishing the results of this launch, which has allowed it to perform 110 incredible tests on a chip containing its Bose-Einstein condensate.
"This is a big step for us," said Gizmodo Becker, a doctoral candidate at Leibniz University in Germany.
Bose-Einstein condensates are gases in which all atoms begin to act together as a single material wave. We write a lot about them because of the many disturbing things physicists do with them.
Becker and his team hope to use these Bose-Einstein condensates based in space as a new type of ultra-precise sensor. When these atomic waves interfere with each other, they form interference patterns that are very sensitive to changes in the force of gravity, which can be produced by a gravitational wave (or perhaps a passing dark matter particle). … who knows!) . Obviously, this type of sensor would be more useful in a place like space, where there is not much gravity already.
Previous experiments have created zero gravity conditions for testing Bose-Einstein condensates by dropping them from the top. But the towers only offer a few seconds of microgravity. This time, the chip containing the Bose-Einstein condensate experienced six minutes of microgravity 243 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. The 110 automated measurements characterized the process of condensate formation and its size, among many other aspects, according to the document published in Nature.
This is not the only team trying to make Bose-Einstein condensates in space. Scientists aboard the International Space Station are working to create one that other physicists can experiment. MAIUS-1 scientists now provide expertise to the ISS Atmospheric Laboratory Laboratory (CAL) team.
"Such a configuration represents a technical marvel in modern atomic physics," wrote Liang Liu, from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Mechanics of Fine, in a commentary on Nature. Liu called the 110 measurements done in six minutes "amazing".
The scientists MAIUS-2 and 3 will follow, during which scientists will use a Bose-Einstein condensate as a sensor to test one of the key principles of general relativity, the principle of equivalence. Expect these space quantum gases to become an important tool for the exploration of fundamental physics.
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