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To find some from the coldest objects in the universe, you don’t have to go much further than the local university. There, a physicist can use laser light and magnets to cool atoms below the staggering -450 Fahrenheit. They could use these ultra-cold atoms to sense even the weakest magnetic fields in a room or build a clock to the nearest quadrillionth of a second. But they probably wouldn’t be able to take these sensors or watches out of their lab, as they tend to be large and fragile.
A team of physicists from the University of Nottingham has shown that the 3D printing parts for these ultra-cold quantum experiments allow them to shrink their device to only a third of its normal size. Their work published in the journal Physical examination X quantum in August it may open the door for a faster and more affordable way to make smaller, more stable, custom settings for experiments.
Because they obey the rules of quantum mechanics, extremely cold atoms exhibit new and useful behavior. “Supercold atoms are a key technology that goes into many different precision instruments,” said John Kiching, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who was not involved in the study.
“Super-cold atoms are excellent weather sensors. They are excellent sensors for what we call inertial forces, so acceleration and rotation. They are excellent sensors for magnetic fields. And they are excellent vacuum sensors, “added his colleague Stephen Eckel, who was also not involved.
Therefore, physicists have long sought to use ultra-cool nuclear devices in settings ranging from space exploration, where they could aid navigation by sensing changes in vehicle acceleration, to hydrology, where they could pinpoint groundwater by detecting their gravitational attraction above the ground. The process of cooling atoms to take on any of these tasks is often complex and difficult. “After spending a long time as an experimenter with cold atoms, I’m always really disappointed that we spend all our time solving technical problems,” said Nathan Cooper, a physicist at the University of Nottingham and one of the study’s co-authors.
The key to cooling and controlling atoms is to hit them with finely tuned laser light. Warm atoms move at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour, while extremely cold atoms stand almost motionless. Physicists make sure that every time a warm atom is hit by a laser beam, the light hits it in such a way that the atom loses some energy, slows down and becomes colder. They typically operate on a 5-8-foot table covered with a maze of mirrors and lenses — optical components — that direct and manipulate light as it moves toward millions of atoms, often rubidium or sodium, that are held in a special ultra-high vacuum chamber. To control where all the ultra-cold atoms in this chamber are, physicists use magnets; their fields act as fences.
Compared to kilometer particle accelerators or large telescopes, these experimental settings are small. However, they are too large and fragile to become commercialized devices for use outside of academic laboratories. Physicists often spend months arranging every little element of the maze of optics. Even a slight shaking of mirrors and lenses – something that is likely to happen in the field – would mean significant delays in work. “What we wanted to try and do was build something that could be done very quickly and hopefully it would work reliably,” Cooper said. So he and his collaborators turned to 3D printing.
The Nottingham team’s experiment doesn’t take up a whole lot – it has a volume of 0.15 cubic meters, which makes it a little bigger than a pile of 10 large pizza boxes. “He is very, very small. We have reduced the size by about 70 percent compared to the conventional setting, “said Somaya Madhali, a Nottingham graduate student and the study’s lead author. To create it, she and her colleagues are working on something like a very personalized Lego game. Instead of buying parts, they assemble their setup from blocks that they print 3D to be shaped exactly the way they want.
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