New Matter!

Tuckerfan · June 27, 2005, 6:45am

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.

Their work, to be reported in the June 23 issue of Nature, is closely related to the superconductivity of electrons in metals. Observations of superfluids may help solve lingering questions about high-temperature superconductivity, which has widespread applications for magnets, sensors and energy-efficient transport of electricity, said Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel laureate who heads the MIT group and who is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics as well as a principal investigator in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Seeing the superfluid gas so clearly is such a dramatic step that Dan Kleppner, director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, said, “This is not a smoking gun for superfluidity. This is a cannon.”

Muad_Dib · June 27, 2005, 7:32am

Science is so cool.

Snowboarder_Bo · June 27, 2005, 7:39am

that fuckin rocks

FinnAgain · June 27, 2005, 8:28am

Total tangent, but love the Robot Chicken quote.

ShibbOleth · June 27, 2005, 12:21pm

How do they know that they’ve created a new type of matter and not just discovered an unknown pre-existing type?

Ponder_Stibbons · June 27, 2005, 1:44pm

Surely, you agree the distinction here doesn’t matter.
Yes, I did that on purpose.

ShibbOleth · June 27, 2005, 1:56pm

Nice pun, but I actually do believe it’s an important distinction.

Ponder_Stibbons · June 27, 2005, 2:04pm

Well, if we’re going to be serious …

I would say that there is no such thing as “creating a new type of matter”, and that whenever a physicist says that, it’s really just a short-hand way of saying that they have discovered a previously unknown type of matter. Yes, it’s sloppy phrasing on their part, but you have to jazz things up a bit to get the press interested.

Squink · June 27, 2005, 3:12pm

More on the vortices at Physicsweb:
Vortices seen in Fermi gas

ultrafilter · June 27, 2005, 3:19pm

[quote=Dr. Ketterle]
It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity…[/qoute]

You think?