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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."
Croatian scientist Danijel Djurek discovered superconducting ceramic that works reliably at room temperature. Danijel says that current will flow without resistance through the material, which is a mixture of lead, lead carbonate, and silver oxides. Here is article in today's croatian daily paper (sorry, there is no translation). Old news on you.com.au.
Frankly, I wish they would stop claiming every phase transition to form 'the n-th state of matter'. There are literally hundreds of phase transitions in nature, especially at low temperatures. If you start calling every sector of the phase diagram 'a New State Of Matter (tm)' on an equal footing with gases, liquids and solids, you can't stop at Bose-Einstein condensates and these fermionic condensates. What about superconducting metals, vortex lattices, liquid crystals, flowing sand, and what have you. All New Forms Of Matter. That is to say, it's completely arbitrary. Sure it's cool what these guys have done, but they deliberately misrepresent their result to make a catchy headline. A scientist has a responsibility not to do that.