Ultracold atoms are atoms that have been cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, typically below a few microkelvin. At these extremely low temperatures, classical physics gives way to quantum mechanics, and the atoms exhibit novel quantum behaviors such as superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation. To achieve such temperatures, techniques like laser cooling and evaporative cooling are employed, where the former involves using laser light to slow down the atoms, and the latter further cools the gas by allowing the hottest atoms to escape. These ultracold environments are valuable in experimental physics as they provide a controlled setting for studying quantum phenomena, simulating quantum many-body systems, and developing applications such as precision sensors and quantum computers.
Produced inside NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, the ultracold bubbles provide new opportunities to experiment with an exotic state of matter. Since the days of NASA’s…
The International Space Station is officially home to the coolest experiment in space. NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) was installed in the station’s U.S. science…
Physicists reveal an intriguing manifestation of topology, which appears in the depletion rate of topological states of matter in response to an external drive. In…
NASA scientists plan to create the coolest spot in the universe at the International Space Station by freezing gas atoms to a mere billionth of…
Physicists from MIT have created a superfluid gas, the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate, for the first time in an extremely high magnetic field. The magnetic field…
Researchers will use NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory to study ultra-cold quantum gases, exploring how atoms interact in microgravity when they have almost no motion due…
Using a vacuum system that isolates ultracold atoms from room temperature and pressure, scientists reveal new clues about how ultracold atoms interact. Assembling the puzzles…
Using ultracold cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber, scientists have successfully simulated the evolution of the early universe. Physicists have reproduced a pattern resembling the…
By immersing charged barium chloride molecules in an ultracold cloud of calcium atoms, UCLA physicists have pioneered a new cooling technique that may be a…
A newly published study details how MIT scientists create and detect spin-orbit coupling in an atomic Fermi gas, a highly controllable form of quantum degenerate…
Using a technique based on electromagnetically induced transparency, MIT and Harvard scientists have achieved the ability to convert a laser beam into a stream of…
Physicists at the University of Innsbruck have succeeded for the first time in experimentally realizing a new quasiparticle, a repulsive polaron, in an ultracold quantum…
A research team at the University of Innsbruck is the first to successfully create a condensate of the element erbium, making it the third chemical…
By following the dynamics of a quantum system of strongly correlated ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, a team of physicists has demonstrated the superiority…
A new publication demonstrates that the dynamics of a system of ultracold potassium atoms, trapped in an optical lattice, depend surprisingly strongly on the particle…