Image Caption: Artists concept of an atom chip for use by NASAs Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) aboard the International Space Station. CAL will use lasers to cool atoms to ultracold temperatures. Credit: NASA

Elizabeth Landau, NASA

Like dancers in a chorus line, atoms movements become synchronized when lowered to extremely cold temperatures. To study this bizarre phenomenon, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, researchers need to cool atoms to a temperature just above absolute zero the point at which atoms have the least energy and are close to motionless.

The goal of NASAs Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) is to study ultra-cold quantum gases in a facility instrument developed for use on the International Space Station. Scientists will use the facility to explore how differently atoms interact in microgravity when they have almost no motion due to such cold temperatures. With less pull toward the ground from Earth, matter can stay in the form of a Bose Einstein condensate longer, giving researchers the opportunity to observe it better.

The CAL team announced this week that it has succeeded in producing a Bose-Einstein condensate at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a key breakthrough for the instrument leading up to its debut on the space station in late 2016.

A Bose-Einstein condensate is a collection of atoms in a dilute gas that have been lowered to extremely cold temperatures and all occupy the same quantum state, in which all of the atoms have the same energy levels. At a critical temperature, atoms begin to coalesce, overlap and move in synch. The resulting condensate is a new state of matter that behaves like a giant by atomic standards wave.

Its official. CALs ground testbed is the coolest spot at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 200 nano-Kelvin [200 billionths of 1 Kelvin], said CAL Project Scientist Rob Thompson at JPL in Pasadena, California. Achieving Bose-Einstein condensation in our prototype hardware is a crucial step for the mission.

Although these quantum gases had been created before elsewhere on Earth, CAL will explore the condensates in an entirely new regime: the microgravity environment of the space station. It will enable unprecedented research in temperatures colder than any found on Earth.

In the stations microgravity environment, long interaction times and temperatures as low as one picokelvin (one trillionth of one Kelvin, or 293 trillion times less than room temperature) should be achievable. Thats colder than anything known in nature, and the experiments with CAL could potentially create the coldest matter ever observed in the universe. These breakthrough temperatures unlock the potential to observe new quantum phenomena and test some of the most fundamental laws of physics. The CAL investigation could advance our knowledge in the development of exquisitely sensitive quantum detectors, which could be used for monitoring the gravity of the Earth and other planetary bodies, or for building advanced navigation devices.

Ultra-cold atoms will also be useful for space-based optical clocks that will be future time standards, Thompson said.

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