MIT Physicists create new form of matter

[Frequitude]

Those crazy kids at MIT, what will they spit out next? First Ed Miller, now this. Swiped from /.

[ QUOTE ]
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."

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It goes on to say that this was done at 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin. That's pretty chilly.

[PairTheBoard]

[ QUOTE ]
Those crazy kids at MIT, what will they spit out next? First Ed Miller, now this. Swiped from /.

[ QUOTE ]
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."

[/ QUOTE ]


It goes on to say that this was done at 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin. That's pretty chilly.

[/ QUOTE ]

Can't say I understand it, but they say this about how that "chilly" temperature relates to "high temperature superfluidity".

"The MIT team was able to view these superfluid vortices at extremely cold temperatures, when the fermionic gas was cooled to about 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin, very close to absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -459 degrees F). "It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles," Ketterle said. "We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever." Scaled up to the density of electrons in a metal, the superfluid transition temperature in atomic gases would be higher than room temperature."

Now if they could just perfect Fusion Power and give the world unlimited cheap energy.

PairTheBoard

[daryn]

i am really interested in this type of stuff, also high-temperature superconductivity. i'm sure there is some way i could go into graduate study in this field, and eventually end up actually doing something.. i'm just not sure i think it's worth the work.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

[ QUOTE ]
i am really interested in this type of stuff, also high-temperature superconductivity. i'm sure there is some way i could go into graduate study in this field, and eventually end up actually doing something.. i'm just not sure i think it's worth the work.

[/ QUOTE ]
Don't take this the wrong way, but what exactly is worth the work if something you're "really interested in" isn't? I'm not exactly sure what your situation is, but it's my impression that you do pretty well with poker. Is it just that this life is easy and you're planning on just riding that out?