Scientists Create New Form of Matter

soren100 writes "Yahoo News has a story about scientists creating a sixth form of matter. They are calling their new state of matter a 'fermionic condensate.' Somehow they got potassium atoms to form pairs similar to the 'Cooper pairs' that make superconducting possible. Maybe any quantum physicists around can tell us more about this, but it certainly sounds pretty revolutionary. The scientists are predicting that this will lead to 'room temperature solid' superconductors, which in turn will enable us to have better electricity generators, more efficient electric motors, and (our favorite) cheaper maglev trains."

Comments

Re:Sixth form of matter?

[pegasustonans]

"The new matter form is called a fermionic condensate and it is the sixth known form of matter -- after gases, solids, liquids, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995." Come on people, RTFA already... :)

A more in depth article on the subject

[Guy_Warwick]

Deborah Jin the team leader gives more of an idea of her work in this article. http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/4/7

The original press release

[Hittite Creosote]

From Colorado University, the original press release is here.

If you want the actual paper, and have access to the journal, it's published on the online version of Physics Review Letters Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 040403 (2004)

abstract here for those with access.

HIgh Tc

[geordieboy]

I think this is possibly a big step towards room temperature superconductivity. The point is that in normal (even high Tc) superconductors, the forces between the cooper pairs are rather weak, hence the need to cool to at least 70K or so to get the effect. In this fermionic stuff, the force is a little stronger (at least, this is claimed in the article). Thus it may be possible to design a material which uses the same principle as the fermionic gas but in the form of a solid material at say 300K (just as high Tc superconductors are essentially solid B-E condensates, more or less).
BTW, I'm a cosmologist, not a condensed matter person, so I could be talking out of my arse.

Re:Superconductor hype

[danila]

Here is a quote from a great E2 writeup by wheloc:

The fun thing about bosons is that any collection of things which acts sortta like a particle, and who's spins sum to some integer value, will act like a boson. If, for example, you get two electrons traveling together and reduce their temperature sufficiently under the right conditions they will begin to act like a single particle. If one has a spin of +1/2 and the other has a spin of -1/2 then the composite "particle" will have a total spin of 0, effectively making it a boson (this special type of boson is called a "Cooper pair"). Fermions bump into each other, bosons do not. Resistance in a wire (as in Ohm's Law) is caused by electrons bumping into each other. If all the electrons form Cooper pairs then this no longer happens, and electricity can flow through a material much better. This is the principle behind superconductivity.

Apparently, what these guys did was closely related to forming Cooper pairs. When they found out other things related to this, we might be able to understand how to create these pairs at +25C. Right now one of the requirements seems to be to cool down the fermions, but if we find a way around...