On a recent听warm, sunny morning at Boulder鈥檚 municipal airport, CU Boulder physics professor and Fellow Dana Anderson stood听on the tarmac with his colleagues preparing to take to the skies with some very, very cold atoms.
Perched on the wing of a single-propeller airplane, Anderson leaned听inside the fuselage to make a few final adjustments on the equipment tucked into the back seat. The setup is only about the size of a stereo amp, but harnesses a marvel of physics: a tiny cloud of around 10 million individual atoms, cooled to near absolute zero and locked in place by lasers with a force of about 1,000 Gs鈥攏early 100 times the g-force that a human traveling in a supersonic fighter jet would experience.
Anderson hopes that this delicate magneto-optical trap, or MOT, will prove robust enough to hold up to vibrations and radio signals during the roughly 75-minute roundtrip flight to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Ultracold atoms are typically created under highly controlled laboratory conditions. The听day's听demonstration is one of听the first known attempt to take a MOT airborne as passenger on an ordinary civilian airplane.
鈥淚t鈥檚 exciting, and that鈥檚 why we do it,鈥� said听Anderson, the current chair of , a joint institute of CU Boulder and the .
The science behind condensed matter physics is not brand new by any means, but the range of potential applications has only grown in recent decades. Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of CU Boulder and JILA shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for the successful creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a new form of matter in which bosons are cooled down to occupy their lowest quantum state.
Anderson, who collaborated with Cornell and Wieman, has spent years researching how these ultracold atoms might be integrated into next-generation aerospace sensors and navigation devices. When atoms are cooled to near absolute zero, they begin to take on more fundamental sensitivity due to strong interaction with gravity and magnetic fields.
Once cooled and trapped in place by the lasers in a MOT environment, these ultracold atom populations become useful for inertial sensing, providing information equivalent to that of an accelerometer (which measures velocity change in a straight line) and a gyroscope (which measures rotation). Both are essential tools for aviation.
Atomic inertial sensing, once improved and perfected for travel, would be considered far more reliable and accurate than the currently ubiquitous听GPS technology, which relies on satellite data to pinpoint location.
鈥淕PS is delicate and can be jammed easily, either intentionally or accidentally,鈥� Anderson said. 鈥淵ou鈥檇 like to be able to know where you鈥檙e going without it . . . we鈥檙e not yet at the point where we could fly from Boulder to JFK airport with our eyes closed.鈥�
In 2007, Anderson founded , a Boulder-based startup company,听to further his ultracold atom research and create commercial applications for the technology. This latest mini-MOT created by ColdQuanta was engineered mostly from glass, ceramic and silicon rather than metal in order to create a unit small enough to travel in a plane鈥攏o easy design feat.
, a JILA spinoff company that creates electro-optic technologies, provided the laser components for the MOT.
Anderson hopped听into the cockpit and put听on a headset, ready to fly the听plane to Cheyenne while his colleagues Jaime Ramirez-Serrano and Janet Duggan, both ColdQuanta scientists, ride along to monitor the equipment. After the flight, the researchers plan to analyze the data and see how the MOT held up in order to continue tweaking the design.
With final preparations complete, the plane is cleared for takeoff. Amid听cheers from onlookers representing the scientific staffs of both ColdQuanta and Vescent, Anderson fired听up the engine. The small plane taxied听to the edge of the runway and took听off smoothly into the morning sunshine.
