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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 #$(*&^#@$^%.
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
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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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."
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.
Read further - immediately after that comment:
"Scaled up to the density of electrons in a metal, the superfluid transition temperature in atomic gases would be higher than room temperature."
So maybe it could actually be used.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Neutron stars have superfluid cores. Superfluidity isn't quite the same as superconductivity, but it's related. See http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970213.html, for example.
-- Steve
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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!