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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."
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 #$(*&^#@$^%.
"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--
I'm pretty sure I can put it to much better use than MIT.
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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"
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!
----
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.
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
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.
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)
By their definition, with $100 in my bank account, I am a millionaire.
News for Nerds. Stuff about matter.
from the article
"The team observed fermionic superfluidity in the lithium-6 isotope comprising three protons, three neutrons and three electrons. Since the total number of constituents is odd, lithium-6 is a fermion."
So this is a fermi condensate, and not a boson condensate.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
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.
As mentioned in another post, this is a Fermi condensate, where Fermions are "those things that aren't Bosons". Fundamentally different and potentially nifty.
No, lithium-6 is a fermion, not a boson, so it's called a Fermion condensate. It's been theorized for years but apparently no one has actually succeeded in creating it until now?
Bing! You hit my mayor gripe with the blurb; plasma was the first truly new state of matter discovered. Not to take away from the interesting discovery the MIT-ans have made, but it most surely isn't the first new state of matter found.
Byline: to talk about a 'state of matter' I've found is quite illusory. Different configurations and concentrations of atoms/molecules produce different behaviours...lumping them into 'states of matter' just doesn't do reality justice, even though it simplifies things for those who don't delve into that kind of thing (ie non-physicists).
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
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?
How about Fart? For Fermions At Reduced Temperature, of course.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
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.
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!
What this article is talking about is the discovery of superfluidity in a fermi gas-ie, flow without resistance. More information can be found about it from physicsweb
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.
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.
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