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Another New State of Matter

Posted by michael on from the paler-shade-of-midnight dept.

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."

2 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. Am I missing the point? by dragons_flight · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Am I missing the point? by dabacon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The real accomplishment was using a Bose-Einstein condesate to very easily construct and arrangement of atoms that would otherwise be technologically very hard

      Yep. While, as mentioned, you could do this with any supercold gas, the important point is that one should be able to use this to create uniformly populated optical lattices. This would be great for doing things like [hype mode on]building a quantum computer![hype mode off]

      Also neat is that this looks like a nice clean system for studying a quantum phase transition, but calling it a new state of matter is a bit odd. As far as I know, the observation of a Mott Insulator is nothing new...though in the context of supercold atomic systems this is probably new.

      Interestingly, when I searched Google for Mott Insulator, this experiment was the first to come up! Wow.

      Dabacon