We could all do with a shorter work week, so Australian physicists thought they could do themselves a favor and create an AI that doesn’t need much oversight.

This artificial intelligence system can run and even enhance complex physics experiments, allowing human scientists to concentrate on research design and high-level problems. We would all love to leave the nuts and bolts of our job to a robotic lab assistant.

Three physicists won the Nobel Prize in 2001 for the process that creates a Bose-Einstein condensate, a hyper-cold gas, and this AI system was able to replicate the experiment much better than any scientist could. Thanks to directed radiation, a group of atoms are slowed nearly to a standstill, resulting in all kinds of interesting effects.

The team at the Australian National University cooled a small amount of gas down to 1 microkelvin — a millionth of a degree above absolute zero — then ceded control over to the AI.

The system was then supposed to figure out ways to apply its lasers and control other factors to cool the atoms down to a few hundred nanokelvin (i.e. a billionth of a degree). After repeating the process dozens and dozens of times, the AI found increasingly efficient ways to do so.

Paul Wigley, a co-lead researcher from ANU, explained that the AI managed to do things “a person wouldn’t guess, such as changing one laser’s power up and down, and compensating with another.”

It was surprising to witness the machine learning to do the experiment by itself, from the beginning, in under an hour. “It may be able to come up with complicated ways humans haven’t thought of to get experiments colder and make measurements more precise,” he added.

Even though Bose-Einstein condensates have powerful properties, their extreme sensitivity to fluctuations in energy makes the process of developing and maintaining them particularly difficult.

With AI systems, many parameters can be monitored at once and the process is quickly adjusted in ways that humans could not understand or replicate. As a result, condensates are created faster, under better conditions, and in greater quantities.

It’s also useful that the AI doesn’t ask for lunch breaks or take vacations. Michael Hush, the other co-lead researcher at the University of New South Wales, said that “it’s cheaper than taking a physicist everywhere with you.”
Image Source: Wired.uk