Laborführung - Guided tour through the laboratory.

All students taking the Physik IV course (lecture shown in above photo) were offered to see the Physics laboratory where professor Wallraff and his colleagues are conducting their research.

We began visiting the superconduction lab. At temperatures around 20 millikelvin, research is performed on superconducting circuits for quantum computing. Read more about it here.

The blue cylinder in the above photo is one of four cryostats in which experiments are performed.  One of the researches is demonstrating the equipment to us and explains some aspect of “Circuit Quandumelectrodynamics”. Liquid Helium is used to cool the sample to around 4 K, and then an ingenious procedure of mixing different Helium isotopes cools it even further, eventually reaching 0.02 degrees above the absolute zero. If you think that’s cold, you haven’t seen nothing yet.

In the next laboratory research on Bose-Einstein Condensates is performed. This is a rather new field, with the 2001 Nobel Physics Prize awarded (not to this lab) for its discovery. Behind the black round window in the photo below, just under the thumb, is the location where the exotic matter is created.

The BEC state of matter is very strange, from the perspective of the normal world. To even exist, it requires temperatures lower than 20 nK, or 0.00000002 degrees (!) above the absolute zero. To reach such extreme temperatures, a delicate arrangement with lasers, mirrors and lenses is used, followed by removing all but the very coldest atoms in a sort of a centrifuge arrangement.

We were told that this experiment had taken years just to build. I’m not surprised…

It was interesting to see these experiments, and I was impressed by how much we, just being bachelor students, were welcomed and the level of detail we were able to understand. This was the first time I had visited an experimental physics laboratory, and I got quite excited over the physics of quantum computing. I’m still just at the introductory level of quantum mechanics, but the two coming years should show whether or not physics is worth going deeper into.