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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."
It's called a Bose-Einstein Condensate. The wavefunctions of the individual particles start to act real funky in that realm.
-Bucky
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.
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