The discovery of a new phase of matter has been announced by a team of physicists, who made the breakthrough following the creation of a novel device they characterize as a “frustration machine.”
In our day-to-day lives, the three most common phases of matter that most of us encounter are solids, liquids, and gases. Plasmas also occur in a variety of everyday circumstances, from the lightning strikes that occur during thunderstorms to welding arcs and the plasmas within the tubes that illuminate neon signs.
However, there are a variety of conditions beyond what we normally experience on Earth, where matter can take on very different forms from those we are used to seeing. These can occur with things that are infinitesimally small or which possess very low states of energy, as well as when under very low temperatures close to absolute zero.
Now, Tigran Sedrakyan, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, and the team document a new phase of matter similar to how it appears under such extreme conditions, which they call the “chiral bose-liquid state,” as reported recently in an article they published in the journal Nature.
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