Researchers Made Ultracold Quantum Bubbles on the Space Station

The experiment gives insight into the quantum realm and has applications for other areas of physics too.“It’s exciting to see the atoms take these new shapes and to see new behaviors when you turn gravity off,” says David Aveline, an author of the study and member of the collaboration working on the Cold Atom Lab, operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.Ultracold atoms of gas—in this case, of rubidium—don’t act the way they normally would at room temperature, zipping around their container like microscopic billiard balls. (Technically, the ultracold atoms need to be cooled even further to be considered a Bose-Einstein condensate, but they’re showing signs of being on the cusp of that.) In any case, while quantum phenomena usually need powerful microscopes to be observed, these bubbles can be inflated to a size much bigger than the width of a human hair.“We’re taking neat physics effects that normally happen at the scale of atoms, and we’re making them happen in objects that are up to a millimeter in size, trying to make quantum mechanics and strange physics behavior visible to the naked eye,” says Nathan Lundblad, an atomic physicist at Bates College in Maine and lead author of the study.This research could have applications beyond the world of quantum physics. I see a lot of biological experiments in space, but in terms of the physical sciences, I think the Cold Atom Laboratory has been fantastic,” says Barry Garraway, a quantum physicist at the University of Sussex in the UK who earlier led theoretical work on Bose-Einstein condensates and isn’t involved in CAL.