ZARM Talk: Ultra-cold atoms in microgravity
On July 10 at 2 p.m., Marian Woltmann explains how bringing Bose-Einstein condensates into microgravity enables new applications and unprecedented precision for cold-atom quantum technologies.
ZARM Talk by Marian Woltmann
from ZARM, University of Bremen
- Date: 10 July 2025
- Time: 14:00
- Location: ZARM, room 1730
Ultra-cold atoms are a versatile tool in quantum sensing, computing and communication applications as well as fundamental sciences. For a broad variety of these applications extending the time the atoms are in free fall fundamentally boosts the experiments performance. One example: In atom interferometers used for inertial sensing, the sensitivity scales with the squared free fall time. In ground based experiments the size of the vacuum chamber limits these times mostly to time scales of milliseconds. Therefore the cold-atom community strongly moves towards microgravity experiments to overcome this hurdle and to enable new applications. Furthermore Bose-Einstein-Condensation (BEC) achieved by intensive cooling ensures low expansion energies, needed to get observable atom densities even after the extended free expansion. Here I present the PRIMUS and ORKA experiments, working on establishing all-optical BEC sources for microgravity experiments in the Bremen Drop Tower and the GraviTower Bremen.
