Observation of Bose-Einstein condensates in an Earth-orbiting research lab

Quantum mechanics governs the microscopic world, where low mass and momentum reveal anatural wave-particle duality. Magnifying quantum behavior to macroscopic scales is a ma-jor strength of cooling and trapping atomic gases, where low momentum is engineered throughunnaturally low temperatures. Advances in this field have achieved such precise control overatomic systems that gravity, often negligible when considering individual atoms, has emerged asa significant obstacle; not only limiting access to lower temperatures (1, 2), but also suppress-ing the full potential of atom-wave inertial sensors that are greatly enhanced by extended free-fall (3). Planetary orbit, specifically the condition of perpetual free-fall, offers to lift cold atomstudies beyond such terrestrial limitations. To that end, we report the launch and successfuloperation of the Cold Atom Lab (CAL), a versatile, collaborative, multi-user research facilityin low-Earth orbit. Free from the asymmetric pull of gravity, production of rubidium Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) in weak trapping potentials is observed at sub-nanoKelvin temper-atures and free-expansion times extending beyond one second. The CAL instrument, remotelyoperated from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has traveled over 400 million kilometers aboardthe International Space Station (ISS) during the last 1.5 years as it continues to conduct scienceoperations for an international group of researchers. With routine BEC production, ongoingoperations will support long-term investigations of trap topologies unique to microgravity (4,5),novel atom-laser sources (6), few-body physics (7,8), and pathfinding techniques for atom-waveinterferometry