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Another New State of Matter
llamalicious writes: "And you thought a Nobel Prize for the discovery of Bose-Einstein Condensates was nifty, SciAm's reporting that scientists are taking this new discovery one step further, and have once more proven that we don't really know anything about quantum physics. This new state is being called a patterned fluid, which could supposedly move the field of quantum computing ahead."
Reading the article and looking at the group's website, this doesn't seem all that special. In fact, unless I'm misinterpreting the result, it seems that you could build a Mott insulator with any kind of supercold gas. The real accomplishment was using a Bose-Einstein condensate to very easily construct an arrangement of atoms that would otherwise be technologically very hard. That they did it by means of a quantum phase transition (adjusting the parameters of the potential to produce a qualitative different wave function) is cool, but not exactly new.
It's a neat hack, and I can imagine uses for being able to turn a BEC on and off at will, as well as for atomic arrays, but it just doesn't grab me as being all that radical. I would question calling it a new state of matter. More like a unusual way to make a very special kind of gas. Of course, I might just be missing something.
Anyone know of a good difinition of a "State of Matter"? I think it is just one of those buzzwords some of the press used to grab attention for a science story.
This certainly isn't a new phase of matter (like solid/liqud/gas etc) because I believe the thermodynamic definitions of phase changes involve how the heat capacity (or enthalpy) changes with temperature. This change in property of the BE gas is due to changing the LASER settings, not the temperature.