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MIT Physicists Create New Form of Matter
Ninwa writes "According to the MIT news office the folks in their labs have really outdone themselves this time, they've
created a new form of matter. The post states, 'They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.' It has been said that this could solve the mysteries in superconductivity."
Does this new form of matter have a name to it, yet? By the way, what are the 'old' types of matter? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma??
A "Magneto-optical trap".
m ot.html
http://www.npl.co.uk/quantum/projects/project1-1/
one of my fav physics tools because it uses lasers and magnets! it's just so science-fictiony!
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Check out my music video!
Science is full of neat, world-changing phenomina that we can't get to occur in a practical setting (or, at least, to the degree we'd like).
;)
* 90% of the universe is hydrogen. H + H fusion produces crazy amounts of energy. But dang it, those electrons out there have all sorts of zany ways to dissipate the energy that you spend trying to surpass the Coulomb barrier.
* At low temperatures, some gasses behave as superfluids (like in the article). No friction. But darn those temperatures!
* Superconductors are the same, but even more frustrating in ways. Example: we found superconductors... but they only work at extremely cold temperatures. Then we found "high temperature" (i.e., liquid nitrogen-temperature) superconductors... but they're all brittle ceramics, limiting their uses. Another example: superconductors would have near boundless theoretical conduction potential... but, whoops, when you pass a current through a superconductor, it creates a magnetic field which will destroy its superconducting properties. We partly solve this by adding impurities to pin down the field lines, but we still have sadly limited capacity (even if it's much better than, say, copper).
* Carbon nanotubes have ridiculous strengths for their density. SWNTs have been measured up to 60 GPa tensile strength (theoretically much higher is capable), and MWNTs over 100. And yet, nanotube composites don't generally even outperform conventional materials because we can only produce tiny tubes held together weakly by vdw and pi bonds.
I can think of dozens more offhand. Science likes to tantalize you with incredible possibilities that float just outside your reach
What a crazy random happenstance!
How many forms of matter do we have now? What are the criteria to distinguish types of matter?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Most designs for perpetual motion machines fail because they're designed to allow you to perpetually extract energy from them, not store energy forever. Sure, a flywheel in intergalactic space could rotate indefinitely, but the moment you try to extract energy it can't anymore. Kinda makes it useless.
If they can get liquid oxygen to act as a superfluid, then it might make liquid-fuel rocket motors much more predictable and therefore safer.
Once you get to room temperatures, it would not be impossible to build a subway system that used it, giving you next to zero friction, reducing costs and increasing speeds.
Depending on the limits of room-temperature superfluid gasses, it might also be effective at disrupting hurricanes. You wouldn't be looking at creating enough energy to disrupt the hurricane - superfluid gasses wouldn't directly interact with it, no friction! Instead, you're looking for a way to reduce the stability and cohesiveness of the structure by introducing something that simply isn't stable as a single gigantic vortex.
Lastly, it'll improve NASCAR racing, as they can pump room-temp superfluid gasses from the pits onto the track, eliminating air resistance and downforce, causing the cars to massively accelerate....
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Superconducting rings don't lose energy over time. They actually both reject external fields and contain internal E&M fields so. There's also an experiemnt where some people took a superconducting ring, started a current in it, and left it alone for a couple years, periodially checking it's current. It remained the same.
Mechanical superfluids don't transfer energy since we keep the container vessel at a fixed temperature. The fluid equlibrises (sp?) to that temperature and then no heat flows. It's misleading to say that it's perpetual energy since you have to put energy in to cool the vessel down. Regardless, they do have _zero_ viscosity which could turn out to be useful somewhere.
-Bucky
Does this mean that a star's core might be superconducting given a low enough temperature and a high enough density? From a relativistic standpoint, what happens as you shove more mass in? The mass/energy is getting greater, but does the normalized value of the temperature start decreasing? I think that this finding is going to be interesting for more reasons than just superconductivity. Of course, not being a physicist, I might be (heck, am probably) wrong.
That is all.
Err... So?
... *gulp* hook, line, sinker...
I know this is a troll, but
It's not like people think, "holy crap, I'm a handsome, well built; oh darn, there goes my interest in science and my IQ got divided by two!".
Well built and fit-as-hell actor Dolph Lundgren holds a masters degree in chemical engineering. He was also offered a Fulbright scholarship to study at MIT. He turned that down to pursue a career in acting.
Is it just me or does there appear to be a US specific mantra that a lot of people chant on this website that in order to have something useful between your ears you simply CAN NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be in good shape, or in this case "poor guy, he's got muscle tone, he probably needs help doing simple additions".
</rant>
I'm curious how you'd measure the current of a superconducting ring without disturbing it. I suppose you could measure the magnetic field it creates, but it seems like that would disturb the field, and thus disturb the current.