Slashdot Mirror
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."
Lots of weird shit happens when you approach absolute zero.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That's just the Vogons posting notice of the interstellar space highway to be built through here next millennium.
Foolish MIT scientists; they've mis-interpreted the posting. Superconductivity has been proven impossible by the science planet #$(*&^#@$^%.
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??
"It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles," Ketterle said. "We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever."
I was quite disappointed... I expected something new that I could actually use... oh well.
--Mike--
Does this superconductive matter stuff really actually matter?
I'm pretty sure I can put it to much better use than MIT.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
See the picture at top right on the article and check out these nerds. Okay the first 3 or your every day run of the mill science nerds and then you get to the guy on the right, Andre Schirotzek. Isn't this guy a little attractive and built to be a scientist at MIT? No scientist that looks like that and creates a new form of matter can get away without becomming a superhero/villian through some bizarre mixup in an experiment.
My favorite one - Neutronium
The Raven
a grain of salt?
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
of course, the high temp they mention is what most of us would call dang cold ...
So you're still going to have problems using this to homebrew your next superconductive massively parallel home computer network - unless you live inside a really cold freezer (the ones here are only -80 C, which is way warmer than that, and you need a parka for that).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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!
----
Check out my music video!
It may be new, but I'll bet the Supreme Court will let it be siezed under emminent domain.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I mean, it's not shorts and t-shirts weather, but it's not too shabby for New England...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
He should be promoted to Untracold Molecules for this breakthrough.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
|| If you start a superfluid rotating and it flows without friction, will it ever stop?
Yes, it will stop... taxes diminish it by roughly 8.5%, depending on locality.
Hey. Except you are putting a shitload of energy to sustain it yea. So its not perpetual motion just motion of matter at an odd state. If you could sustain it indefinatly then it would work. Haven't you read the laws of thermodynamics??
My UID is prime is yours?
In order to achieve 50 nanokelvin, you have to use "laser and evaporative cooling techniques". The article failed to explain how that worked, so here it goes. Temperature is essentially a measurement of the average kinetic energy (energy of motion) of a bunch of atoms/molecules. So when you're working with small samples of gas, cooling it down is essentially slowing it down. In laser cooling, a laser with a material-specific frequency is shown towards a sample of gas which is moving toward it. The photons striking the gas are absorbed and then re-emitted. Some of the kinetic energy goes into the re-emitted photons and therefore the gas sample cools. Evaporative cooling is similar to what you'd expect. The gas sample is placed into an inverted "cone". (Note: Not a physical container, but made of lasers and magnetic fields.) The faster moving atoms/molecules move upwards and out while the slower moving ones settle to the bottom. The end result is a supercooled gas at the bottom of your "cone". I am not a physicist, but this is how it was explained to me by one of Ketterle's grad students. I went on a tour of the lab a week before this discovery was made. Surprisingly, it was a sweltering 90 degrees in the room.
A "Magneto-optical trap".
m ot.html [npl.co.uk]
... kind of tech.
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!
Ah, but you should have seen the new device they're using to mix micromolar quantities of ligands that I just saw - it's got three input dispensers on a head at angles, a top mixing chamber, and then a long thin tube which is heated by microwaves.
It actually looks like the Romulan Cloaking Device after installation
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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
Or when you go REAL high... :-P, but to me that just sounds like plain old bullshit).
We feel temperatures differently, than how they really are. We actually measure some sorth of logarithmic scale (well, with our current theories physics uses the inverse of it
Meaning that if you put 10C extra when it's 0.005C it does much. However, if you add 10C to 1500C it doesn't do shit.
Thus meaning, that if we want to know more, we need to get to the extremes of temerature (just imagine fusion etc). But note too, that -most of the time- there are methods to 'trick' nature. Meaning we might be able to get these same effects on temperatures that are 50 times higher (still very cold) (& note COLD fusion)
(meaning you are right)
In order to achieve 50 nanokelvin, you have to use "laser and evaporative cooling techniques". The article failed to explain how that worked, so here it goes...
...
Darn, and I was hoping it would be someone standing next to a giant laser on a tripod, holding a bellows to cool a tray of liquid nitrogen icecubes
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
that's matter
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Explanation of what "funky" means... The wave-functions of the particles start collapsing, essentially describing one giant particle. You are unable to distinguish one particle from the other, since they have the same wave-function - they collapse into the lowest possible quantum state.
I thought gasesous superfluids (Bose-Einstein Condensate) had already been created in 1995:
Bose-Einstein condensate is a gaseous superfluid phase formed by atoms cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero. The first such condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvins (nK). Under such conditions, a large fraction of the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state, producing a superfluid.
Wikipedia article
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
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.
You haven't read the article, have you? Both of these exist, they just have to be really cold to work, which requires energy to maintain.
First of all, as previously mentioned, 50 nanoKelvin, i.e. 0.000000050 K degrees is nowhere close to room temperature. The definition of temperature is what they are playing with to call this "hot", saying the density is low.
Otherwise I think even superconductor rings lose energy over time, because they have a magnetic field, which can induce current in moving conducturs, which in turn generates an opposing magnetic field that generates a back emf slowing the superconducting electrons down. That's how you take back the electrical energy stored in them, but that's also how anything conducting moving in its magnetic field "steals" energy and loses it through ohmic resistance.
Even mechanical superfluids interact with their environment, if by nothing else, by electromagnetic radiation, to the nearest wall, which then conducts the heat/cold away. (Unless of course you have full thermal death in the Universe, everything being at the same exact temperature, and at this temperature your thing is superfluid.)
Therefore, because of interactions with the imperfect/lossy environment, perfect perpetuum mobile things only exist in an environment that's:
a) either perfectly isolated,
b) or perfectly nonlossy itself
In this world nothing macroscopic is perpetuum mobile, you can only talk about close enough, such as using good bearings on a 10 ton cylinder spinning in a vacuum chamber, where your losses could be made, well, negligible for a decade. Tough it'd be interesting to see these superfluids used as bearing lubricants.
Kinda makes it useless.
Not useless, just a really expensive/extravigant battery.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
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)
It has a much nicer ring.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
By their definition, with $100 in my bank account, I am a millionaire.
He's just the puke who runs the transporter. And apparently one of the few on the ship who's not even an officer.
Its web.mit.edu dude, get real. There is no need to copy and paste the article here. And even when there is a need, you'll notice people do it AC to not be karma whores.
Like the Senator?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
News for Nerds. Stuff about matter.
Image Gallery
(Schirotzek is sooo cute. I'm in geek love)
...or even really really smart, but isnt this similar to a Bose-Einstein Condensate?
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
You were lucky. My father kept the house so cold that I peed snow.
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.
Hey, as long as they don't trigger a ressonance cascade... ;)
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
>>Go back to sleep. When the affordable android
>>Natalie Portman fuck-toys appear, we'll let you
>>know.
Can you add me to that list as well please?
But type 1 superconductors sheilds magnetic flux so there is no magnetic field that induced current.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity
HeeHaw.
As mentioned in another post, this is a Fermi condensate, where Fermions are "those things that aren't Bosons". Fundamentally different and potentially nifty.
If you were to read the article, you would also see that CU Boulder was one of the first to obtain a Fermionic condensate.
The reason this is new is that this is a superfluid state, which hadn't been observed in a Fermionic gas.
It would be nice though, if all problems in science were perfect spheres, homogeneous, hard, and always engaged in perfectly elastic collisions? Oh, and frictionless?
The paper.
They should study the form of matter a server becomes after being Slashdotted. As a bonus once the news story is posted here, their server will also become this new form of matter.
In fact, neutron stars are thought to have superconducting (and superfluid) cores. They also may be superconductors of the strong nuclear force ("color superconductors").
On a related note, "Exploring Superconductors and Neutron Stars on a Desktop using Ultracold Fermi Gases".
Does this mean that, at those temperatures, we can get some freakin' crazy overclocks?
Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, bose-einstein condensate... I think there was one more in the hot range.
Technoli
Wouldn't have minded some 50 nano kelvin air here today, it got up to about 310K in MN this afternoon - even the mosquitoes thought it was too hot.
THIS is the kind of news that belongs on Slashdot! Great find :)
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
one of my fav physics tools because it uses lasers and magnets!
You can mount it on the head of a shark.
u promised not to bring that up agian ... ...
if i promised to lay off the beanie' weanies
This seems like an honest question, why was it modded down?
"They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity."
Sounds like they've been lighting farts again.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Bummer.
This is obviously some new usage of the phrase "high-temperature" that I hadn't heard about yet...
For more details, the preprint of the Nature paper can be found here.
Superconducting supercritial superfluids? Bah! I want "hyper", I want "diemsional" and I want it made into a film with Sandra Bullock. Make it happen!
Nevermind. It doesn't matter.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Science likes to tantalize you with incredible possibilities that float just outside your reach ;)
I think that's just whining. The amount of progress made over the last 30 years alone is astounding: enormous chip densities, DLP chips, single atom imagery, high temperature superconductors, the human genome, amorphous metals, etc.
I fully expect superconductivity, superfluidity, and super-strong materials to become more mainstream over the next decade--that has become more engineering than science at this point. There even is a possibility that some form of desktop fusion will become a reality for energy generation, although that will still require some fundamental insights.
MIT isn't just computer geeks, you know. People in mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, and related disciplines tend to be much less geeky. And even among computer geeks, there is a significant population that hangs out at the gym in their spare time.
So they don't exist unless a perpetual energy source exists ;)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Firstly, no if it remains a superfluid it will not stop.
Secondly, yes it will flow forever. Some scientists checked exactly this. They ran it for a few months. It still had the charge.
Eh, who needs a slight electrical energy or kinetic energy? I suppose there might be a related idea to this that would allow a battery of huge energy with a different basic design than the ones we've had for a few hundred years. Along with the huge number of other potential improvements if we get this stuff to run. There are plenty of great What-if things, but they are all conditional on "What-if we got this crap to run at room temperature."
Most PMM are suppose to create more energy to constantly be extracted. They are all fake (violates conservation of momentum and 2nd law of thermodynamics). In a sense you could say the Earth and the Sun are a PMM. We don't seem to be stopping anytime soon. Furthermore, energy is destroyed, it's rather converted to a less orderly form over time. So if you ever move you can never fully stop.
The point of PMM is to steal this energy all the time. That's not possible. But, yeah, in any frictionless situation crap always keeps moving.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Haven't you read Newton's laws?
"An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force."
Perpetual motion is trivial to accomplish. Just start something moving in an environment without outside forces to affect it - such as, for instance, in outer space between galaxies.
I know what you're thinking - you've heard about thermodynamics and people say that it's impossible and all, but you just haven't heard the whole story. It's impossible to have something moving forever in an environment full of friction because friction=energy loss. If something could work forever even with an energy loss, then it must be generating energy constantly, which is the thing that breaks the law of thermodynamics.
The energy to sustain it is to keep it cold and start it rotating. You could start it rotating in space - which is already about that cold, and it would forever.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Whats a matter?
Religion is a belief system used for explaining things that we cannot easily explain on our own. Why am I here? What happens after death? Where did the universe come from? Science is a religion in that it is a belief system used for explaining things that we cannot easily explain otherwise. Unfortunatly Science does not (yet) answer all the questions we wish to answer. We accept things in religions (including science) on faith. We may believe that there is evidence of those things. I've never seen God, but then again, I've never seen an electron either.
doesn't matter.
Space is not empty. This rotating device you describe - if you send it into space, it will come into contact with external debris, forces and energy. The winner has already been decided - entropy.
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.
...and you'll find an artifact from the early days, before the politics section, blind haughty sniping, and google/apple worship/flamewars.
The first clue is the relatively low userID. Not quite down in the 5 digit range, but well ahead of all the riffraff in the 800s.
The userID is just an indicator. The real proof is the content.
See, once upon a time, you could go to this space and the crowd posted about physics, astronomy, algorithm optimization, mechanical coefficients, Personal Homepage Preprocessor, the latest mersenne prime, and diversions like star wars via telnet.
Yep, the CS majors were paper millionaires, the English majors were making mid-five figures right out of school, and you could sit at your desk and learn all about pi bonds and tensile strength like you were in a 400-level lecture.
A quick scan today reveals a torrent of one-liners trolling for a funny mod if they're lucky. sigh.
this is when you get a bunch of them in a small place and they start arguing about 'Rules of acqusition'...oh wait, I thought you said Ferangi.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
if it is frictionless, how do you get it rotating?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates"
Basically the current article is about the same type of system that landed him The Prize
Oh come now. How do you think they make transparent aluminum?
According to STIV they use an apple 2 and a qauint keyboard
You could be right. There is a good reason to believe there isn't: there's almost nothing between the Earth and the moon, and there's even less the further we get away from the Sun. So the space between galaxies is most likely totally empty.
And if things are moving away from each other as we believe, then it is also likely that something between galaxies will never come into contact with anything else.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
|| if it is frictionless, how do you get it rotating?
Elementary, my dear Watts-n-SWR. You rotate the bell jar that contains it. You place your camera on
the rotating bell jar. As a result, the gas is spinning but the observation platform is not.
In summary... it's all a matter of perspective.
Genius I say.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
1) The sun may be using up it's energy but that energy is not the energy being used to let the Earth revolve around it.
2) The moon causes the tides on the Earth. The sun provides the ocean with heat. When the moon is gone is called a new moon. The friction isn't the issue. There's no friction between the Earth and Moon so whatever is done in the closed system that is the Earth is rather moot. Although it can be used to generate energy so you are minorly correct, but it's such a small amount that the universe would end sooner it's not going to cause any problems.
3) So just remove the small and tiny variables. The fact is the Earth isn't going to stop revolving around the Sun until the Sun swollows us or something hits us.
Sure, the universe is going to end so nothing is perpetual. But, if you can stay in motion from the first second until the end of spacetime. That should count for something.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.