Scientists create a new physical state - both solid and liquid

Scientists from Switzerland and the US have announced the creation of a supersolid - a strange form of material that combines solidity and superfluidity simultaneously. The concept of this substance has existed for a long time, but this is the first time scientists have successfully created such a substance.

In school, we are taught that solid, liquid and gas are the three basic states of matter. But what is often overlooked is that they are not only states, because art has a lot of things we cannot experience in everyday life.

When pressure and temperature reach extreme levels, matter will develop extraordinary properties. At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT (USA), physicists have just confirmed the existence of a new characteristic, a new state of matter.

This state is called super snake . It has the structure of a common solid, but has no viscosity, a property that can only be found in superfluids . In other words, the solid with this crystal structure will " flow" as the smoothest liquid.

An illustration of a super solid, a solid but has a superfluid properties.(Photo: ETH Zurich).

So what is superfluid? It is a liquid with no viscosity. Because there is no viscosity, they have very strange "behavior" . If stirred up, the superfluid will swirl forever and not gradually diminish and then calm down like normal liquid. Finally, the swirl will "climb" onto the wall and spill out into the container. It is hard to imagine a solid that can do the same thing. But scientists from ETH and MIT have found out, and as mentioned above, it's called a supersolid.

This state, as reported by two ETH and MIT studies published in Nature, is described as the first super solid with extremely cold quantum gas.

"It's hard to imagine a material that can simultaneously combine superfluidity and solidity. If your cup of coffee is superfluid and you stir it, it will continue to turn on and on , " Professor Wolfgang Ketterle , MIT research co-author, said.

The MIT group started with the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) , a state also discovered by Professor Ketterle that gave him the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001. BEC status can be achieved at temperatures. extremely low - about a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero in extremely high vacuum environments.

The researchers manipulated substances in the BEC state (BEC) using two laser beams to control their movement and create crystal structures, while quantum gas continued to express the super state. liquid. This is called the stripe phase when the density of the supersolid changes and moves inside like a ripple.

"The material of super-solid materials is extremely simple, but we encountered a great challenge when trying to accurately align the laser beams and keep everything stable to be able to observe the stripe phase , " said co-author Jun-Ru Li research said.

Research team from MIT.(Photo: Internet).

The ETH team also used a BEC to collect supersolid, but instead of two laser beams, they used only a single beam with a special device with two chambers where the light of the laser could create resonance. This resonance captures the atoms of the BEC into a uniform mass.

Scientists have been trying to achieve this state for decades. In 1969, British physicist David Thouless suggested that the superfluid could be transformed into a supersolid, and many tried to do this using the He atom, but failed. The two super-solid substances obtained are not as complex as can be seen in He superfluid.

"Our work has now successfully adopted Thouless's ideas. However, we do not use He, but use a Bose-Einstein condensate," Tobias Donner, co-author of the ETH study. , explain.

There is no technical application to this interesting state, but scientists think it can help us better understand superconductivity and superfluids.