Artificial Intelligence Recreates Complex Nobel-Winning Physics Experiment

Artificial intelligence was used to run a physics experiment, showed a team of researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy (UNSW ADFA).

The team showed an experiment that created a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a very cold gas trapped in a laser beam. They replicated an experiment that was given the 2001 Nobel Prize.

"I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," said Paul Wigley from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering and co-lead author of the study. "A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the universe to run through all the combinations and work this out."

Bose-Einstein condensates are subjected to very low temperatures with a high degree of sensitivity to changes in external stimuli. It gives them the potential to be used so that they can be used for precise measurements in mineral exploration and navigation systems.

Hence, scientists can integrate such condensates into fields so that they can take measurements and even make up for fluctuations that happen overnight.

"You could make a working device measure gravity that you could take in the back of a car, and the artificial intelligence would recalibrate and fix itself no matter what," said Michael Hush from UNSW ADFA and co-lead author along with Wigley. "It's cheaper than taking a physicist everywhere with you."

The team cooled the gas to just about one microkelvin and then handed the three laser beams to the artificial intelligence team. They cooled the gas that was trapped within the laser beams to a few hundred nano-kelvins.

Artificial intelligence completed the experiment with some amazing methods.

"It did things a person wouldn't guess, such as changing one laser's power up and down, and compensating with another," Wigley said. "It may be able to come up with complicated ways humans haven't thought of to get experiments colder and make measurements more precise."

"Next, we plan to employ the artificial intelligence to build an even larger Bose-Einstein condensate faster than we've seen ever before," he concluded.

The findings were published in the May 16 issue of Scientific Reports.