AI learns and recreates Nobel-winning physics experiment (with improvements)
AI learns and recreates Nobel-winning physics experiment
May 16, 2016 by Devin Coldewey
Australian physicists, perhaps searching for a way to
shorten the work week, have created an AI that can run and even improve a
complex physics experiment with little oversight. The research could eventually
allow human scientists to focus on high-level problems and research design,
leaving the nuts and bolts to a robotic lab assistant.
The experiment the AI performed was the creation of a
Bose-Einstein condensate, a hyper-cold gas, the process for which won three
physicists the Nobel Prize in 2001. It involves using directed radiation to
slow a group of atoms nearly to a standstill, producing all manner of
interesting effects.
The Australian National University team cooled a bit of
gas down to 1 microkelvin — that’s a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero
— then handed over control to the AI. It then had to figure out how to apply
its lasers and control other parameters to best cool the atoms down to a few
hundred nanokelvin, and over dozens of repetitions, it found more and more
efficient ways to do so.
“It did things a person wouldn’t guess, such as changing
one laser’s power up and down, and compensating with another,” said ANU’s Paul
Wigley, co-lead researcher, in a news release. “I didn’t expect the machine
could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, 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.”
Bose-Einstein condensates have strange and wonderful
properties, and their extreme sensitivity to fluctuations in energy make them
useful for other experiments and measurements. But that same sensitivity makes
the process of creating and maintaining them difficult. The AI monitors many
parameters at once and can adjust the process quickly and in ways that humans
might not understand, but which are nevertheless effective.
The result: condensates can be created faster, under more
conditions, and in greater quantities. Not to mention the AI doesn’t eat,
sleep, or take vacations.
“It’s cheaper than taking a physicist everywhere with
you,” said the other co-lead researcher, Michael Hush, of the University of New
South Wales. “You could make a working device to measure gravity that you could
take in the back of a car, and the artificial intelligence would recalibrate
and fix itself no matter what.”
This AI is extremely specific in its design, of course,
and can’t be applied as-is to other problems; for more flexible automation,
physicists will still have to rely on the general-purpose research units called
“graduate students.”
The team’s research appeared today in the journal
Scientific Reports.
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