“Tiangong Station, this is Earth, what are you doing up there?”
“We’re just chilling with our atoms here”
Ground control to Tiangong
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?
Shedding heat in space is hard since you transfer most heat by direct contact and space is super empty, so more likely the former than the latter. Or could be just for the flex of it, I guess, prove it’s possible because it’s hard.
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/
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.
The idea is to create cryogenic electronics that operate near absolute zero with minimal power. https://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/54866-an-ultra-low-power-technology-expands-quantum-and-space-potential
There are also ideas for putting quantum computers on dirigibles in the stratosphere https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/26198/green-quantum-computing-takes-to-the-skies/
And China has already been doing a lot of experiments with quantum communication using satellites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Experiments_at_Space_Scale
