yogthos comments on Chinese scientists chill atoms to record low on Tiangong space station

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 3 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Does anyone know if doing this in space is because we want ultra-cold materials in space or because space provides some advantage in making matter ultra-cold?

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[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml [S] 4 points 19 hours ago* (1 child)

One obvious advantage is that the ambient environment is already cold. Also, there are reasons to want ultra-cold materials in space. For example, the substrate used to do quantum computing needs to stay ultra-cold, so putting quantum computers in space makes sense. https://www.uni.lu/snt-en/news/how-quantum-computing-is-transforming-space-research/

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[–] AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

It's true that you can in a sense say that space is absurdly cold, like near absolute zero if I remember right, but it doesn't really help because there's nearly nothing in the vacuum of space to shed heat to. That was a huge criticism of recent suggestions to put data centers in space. As far as I can tell, the article doesn't even say anything about putting quantum computers in space. I think they're planning to use them to optimize some satellite problems.