What changed
A Chinese team cooled a cloud of rubidium atoms to 9.7 picokelvin for seven seconds inside an ultracold-atom cabinet on the China Space Station. The result, published in Science on November 6 Beijing time, is presented as the lowest known human-made temperature.
The project was led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, with Peking University and the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics. It began feasibility work in 2011, was completed in 2022 and reached orbit aboard the Mengtian module.
Why it matters
Nine-point-seven picokelvin is a useful reminder that “cold” here is not a weather report. It is a controlled laboratory state just above absolute zero: 0 kelvin, or −273.15°C. The temperature is 14 orders of magnitude below room temperature.
The experiment used an all-optical trap to cool and hold the atoms. In the station’s microgravity environment, the team needed only a weak restraint, allowing the cloud to cool further and remain observable longer. That makes the orbital laboratory more than a trophy case for a record. It is a platform for watching matter behave in ways that are difficult to isolate on Earth.
The immediate scientific payoff is access to questions about quantum-gas phase changes, nonequilibrium dynamics and interactions among many quantum particles. The same platform could support work on early-universe simulations and searches for ultralight dark matter.
The practical promises are longer-term. Such ultracold atoms may help advance atomic clocks, quantum simulators, atom-interferometer navigation and sensors that measure gravity or test fundamental constants. Those applications remain prospective, and the result still needs independent replication before its wider significance is settled.
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