Slashdot Mirror
First Experimental Success of a Superfluid
J writes "Researchers at Rice University have created and observed a state of quantum superfluidity. Cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, fermions overcome their natural tendency to repel one another. These half-spin particles become dominated by the Strong force and couple up in pairs that behave as one particle. Major benefits to matter in a superfluid state include superconductivity, a state where electrons would flow freely with no resistance, thus preserving the most amount of electrical charge during passage and providing the ability to save billions of dollars in 'lost electricity'. Although the conditions set for this experiment are very unlikely to be able to exist outside of a laboratory, we now know that superfluidity is a concept that can exist. Future research in this topic is assumed to be finding a material that exists in a superfluid state at room temperature."
I read the article.
... "
2 3090405.htm 2 4100818.htm
I read it well.
But on the side (right side) there was a related news story thing and within one of the links it stated,
"(June 25, 2005) -- MIT scientists have brought a supercool end to a heated race among physicists: They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.
So, being curious, I clicked the link and oddly enough, it basically stated the same exact stuff. The difference, though? It said MIT did it.
Who are the actual people who did this? Did MIT do it first and Rice got the credits? Am I mis-reading both articles and they're completely different?
TFA: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/0512
MIT Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/0506
News for nerds. Stuff about matters?
"Scientists in Antarctica discover superfluid at room temperature"
May the Strong force be with you.
The phrase "link up" is misleading. What happens is that the Fermi sea becomes unstable to the formation of statistically correlated pairs of electrons below a certain temperature. They never violate the Pauli Exclusion principle, but the spin-statistics behavior changes so that they can be thought of as Bosons.
"I'm not exactly sure how a Bose-Einstein condensate creates a single quantum state, but is this more of the same?"
Again, the Slashdot article is poorly worded, or the chao who wrote it doesn't really understand what he's talking about:
In a BEC, all the Bosons occupy one single particle quantumstate, and you thus have a highly coherent many particle state that is not averaged out over large length scales.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
- Superfluidity isnt new, it's been around for 50+ years.
- Superfluidity is only tangentially related to superconductivity.
- Superfluidity is not particularly useful in and of itself.
- Superfluidity among ferminons *is* new and interesting to physics geeks.
As to its applications to daiily life, well, unlikely in the short run.Superfluid materials are well-known; the first example, the boson helium-4, was discovered in 1937. The superfluidity of helium-3, a fermion, was shown to be a superfluid in the 1970s.
Superfluidity occurs when particles pair up (half spin-up and half spin-down) to produce a material without viscosity, in a manner analogous to that of the electron Cooper pairs of superconductivity. The novelty here is that superfluidity has been shown to occur in particle populations in which there is an unequal number of spin-up and spin-down particles, and the discovery of a phase change in which "when unpaired spin-up atoms rose above 10 percent of the total sample, the unpaired loners were suddenly expelled, leaving a core of superfluid pairs surrounded by a shell of excess spin-up atoms" (from TFA).
Helium in superfluidic state has been known for a long time, and studied quite extensively. So, superfluidity is not the issue here.
This achievement, it seems to me, is about getting superfluidity in a bunch of fermions (such as electrons, or, in this case, 'fermionic' lithium-6), and that too in a system in which the up-spins are not the same as the 'down-spins'.
Well to the people who said 'Superfluidity is old news' It is true superfluidity has been around for many years (discovered by Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, John F. Allen, and Don Misener in 1937). However the 'study of superfluidity' (also known as Quantum hydrodynamics) is a recent advancement. (and a very important one I might add)
For those wondering about its 'practical uses', Superfluidity not only unleashes possibilities for new technologies dealing with energy and heat transfer (superconductivity), it also brings us another step closer to developing a better means of energy production. (Check out the link below for more details)
For those of you with a background in atomic physics; If some how (using further experimentation in Superfluidity of helium) we can proove the possibility of electrons in quantum states 'lower' than n=1 (i.e. n=1/2, 1/4 etc) the amount of energy we can produce using hydrogen would increase by almost 70% compared to our present technology (greater than the amount produced by nuclear means) This in turn means that the race for nuclear energy going on in the east (russia, iran, cuba, north korea, china, india etc.) would end.
For more information on the possibility and importance of fractional primary quantum numbers click here.
Randall Mills is a medical doctor and well known crackpot who has been bilking investors out of their money for years now with his "hydrino" theory, which rests on the idea that there are energy states in the atom lower than the ground state (as the above poster mentioned). The only problem is that no such states actually exist as far as all experiments are concerned, except mysteriously Mills' own experiments, which no one has ever reproduced and the details of which he refuses to release. His hydrino theory itself is based on his "Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics", found in his 1200-page self-published book, which purports to unify electromagnetism, gravity, Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, and quantum theory.
+4 Informative, my ass.
(And to address another point, I cannot think of any "new technologies" in "energy and heat transfer" that have been "unleashed" by superfluidity.)