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."

Comments

Short synopsis for the lazy

[winkydink]

Lots of weird shit happens when you approach absolute zero.

Re:Short synopsis for the lazy

[Rei]

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 ;)

Re:Short synopsis for the lazy

[Vengie]

you shouldn't abbreviate london forces as vdw. or at least type out van der waals. :P [technically ALL dipole interactions are vdw...]
(people can't google for VDW if they don't know what it means....and i have faith that at least ONE reader out there would have wanted to google it)
</chem snob>

Re:Short synopsis for the lazy

[iammaxus]

A small correction on your thing about nanotubes: the limiting factor in current nanotube composites is not the weakness of inter-nanotube bonds, but the fact that nanotube composites do not even use these weak bonds well enough. Spinning fibers of dense, aligned nanotubes is very difficult.

Of course, longer nanotubes would help, as you suggest, but I'm saying that even current nanotube production techniques could theoretically produce some extremely high tensile strength fibers (they can already claim the highest toughness).

Re:Short synopsis for the lazy

[Associate]

Shame on me for responding to a troll, but in science, glasses are only empty when they're in a vacuum.

Re:Short synopsis for the lazy

[mcrbids]

Science likes to tantalize you with incredible possibilities that float just outside your reach ;)

Yes, but it's because of work like this that so many miracles do, in fact, happen.

* Ever stop to consider that the thermal density in recent P4/Athlon CPUs is actually higher than the thermal density of a nuclear power plant?

* Speaking of which, how about those nuclear power plants - 1 lb of radioactive material able to provide power for a city for a year or more...

* Power used to light up lights, like those nifty Compact Florescent bulbs that are so power efficient. Exotic power - a Florescent bulb creates an intense radio signal by blasting electricity at thousands of volts (essentially, a spark several inches long) through a vacuum tube, dusted with dust that floresces (glows) as it converts the radio signal into visible light... Fancy that - they cost me about a buck each, and are 4-5 times as efficient as regular incandescent light bulbs.

* Let's not even get into an obvious one - the Internet. Where are you? I'm in California - but it doesn't matter, does it? You can read this merely seconds after I post it, wherever you happen to be...

* I'm about to go jogging in my new running shoes, created from an exotic foam material that springs unnaturally, preventing injuries to my knees and ankles as I jog - they can take a pounding over and over again, yet their cost is only around $40.

* Its not uncommon for me to run in a Gore-tex suit. Comprising of nylon (itself a miracle material from the early 1900s) fabric covering a Mylar membrane with microscopic holes in it. Mylar is, itself, incredible in its strength-weight ratio, but the microscopic holes allow my sweat to evaporate and keep me dry, even when it's raining or the jacket is wet - the holes allow water vapor through while being far too small for liquid water to go through, effectively blocking it.

While science might appear to tantalize with things out of reach, we only remember them because they are out of reach. When you really consider it, the miracles within our grasp are nothing short of incredible.

Check out the guy on the right

[DongleFondle]

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.

many more ...

[vlad_petric]

See this index .

My favorite one - Neutronium

Technology used

[badmicrophone]

A "Magneto-optical trap".

http://www.npl.co.uk/quantum/projects/project1-1/m ot.html

one of my fav physics tools because it uses lasers and magnets! it's just so science-fictiony!

----
Check out my music video!

Give him a promotion

[Nom du Keyboard]

Dan Kleppner, director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms

He should be promoted to Untracold Molecules for this breakthrough.

Cooling Techniques

[Jazzer_Techie]

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.

Re:50 NanoKelvin == High-Temperature !?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stuff

[servognome]

that's matter

BEC

[vivin]

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

Re:Can someone sum this up?

[Eightyford]

Matter can exist in four phases (or states), solid, liquid, gas, and plasma plus a few other extreme phases, like critical fluids and degenerate gases.

Re:perpetual motion

[sillybilly]

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.

Slashdot:

[Klowner]

News for Nerds. Stuff about matter.

Re:Can someone sum this up?

[nmpeglit]

Well, it seems that it depends who you ask. Particle physicists will say that matter can be split into elementary particles. These particles can be divided into two categories, fermions and bosons. Fermions are all the elementary particles that are building blocks of nature e.g electrons are fermions, quarks are fermions etc... They have a half integral spin. Bosons are all the carriers of forces. Photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force and has integral spin. Hence it is a boson. The idea is that these two different categories of particles have a nice property. Fermions obey the Fermi - Dirac statistics while bosons obey the Bose - Einstein statistics. What this means is that an infinite amount of bosons can coexist in the same quantum state while this does not apply to fermions ( technicallities omitted ). This is known as Pauli's exclusion principle. That is why an infinite amount of bosons can add up and create a macroscopic force and why all matter has not condensed to a drop of infinite density. Neat huh?

Now, particle physicists will say that all these fermions and bosons and their combinations ( you can have baryons and mesons etc etc - doesn't matter what these are ) are "ordinary matter". Electron - Electron pairs ( Coopper pairs ) that are formed in superconductors ( and make the phenomenon possible ) or whatever weird combination of ferminos and bosons you come up with are called "states of matter" or something like that but not a new form of matter. You have ordinary matter there, part of the so called Standard Model. It is just elecrtrons and atoms and so on but combined in a different way and with different external conditions ( like pressure and temperature ). So they are just different states of matter.

There are some cosmology related problems these days. One of these is that the ordinary matter that experts can see with their telescopes amounts to a tiny fraction of the matter that they calculate there is out there. Let's say 5% ( I do not really remember the exact number, but it is quite small ). What is the nature of the rest 95%? There are some speculations but what experts say is that "it is a new form of matter". No protons, no electrons, no neutrinos. Nothing that can emit radiation ( that's why the name dark matter ). Fascinating... No need to say more about this, interesting stuff however, you can google it or have a look at wikipedia for dark matter, cosmological constant and each page will bring another and so on.

The conclusion: Not a new form of matter but a new state of it. And by the way, superfluidity is a phenomenon discovered around the '30s. Certainly there are many interesting things about it and is not a "job done" however keep in mind that laboratories are also very aware of public relations. If this is a breakthrough or an important discovery, experts will decide and time will tell.

Cheers!