The black holes in our universe may seem like bizarre, voracious beasts – but stranger ones are possible. Simulations of black holes have revealed the first superfluid specimen.
Superfluids are a form of matter that take mere melting one step further. When a solid turns to a liquid, what was once sturdy and inflexible begins to flow. Superfluids have zero stickiness or viscosity: they can even flow uphill. They also have completely uniform temperature.
But superfluids are extremely difficult to create. Only liquid helium has been coaxed into going superfluid, and then only at temperatures close to absolute zero. The stuff is even harder to study or model: many of the important calculations are ones that nobody knows how to do yet.
Now, Robert Mann at the University of Waterloo in Canada and his colleagues have modelled a theoretical black hole that changes in a way that’s mathematically identical to what liquid helium does when it turns superfluid.
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