It's basically like a Bose-Einstein condensate, but composed of fermions instead of bosons. Pretty cool stuff!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
That is pretty awesome, though I'm not sure I understand how the superconductor would lead to the frictionless trains. Satyagraha
Posts: 1986 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote: The new matter form is called a fermionic condensate and it is the sixth known form of matter -- after gases, solids, liquids, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995.
Wow. I thought I was special knowing about plasma, I'd never heard of Bose-Einstein condensate before. That's pretty cool! Posts: 4174 | Registered: Sep 2003
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You know, I noticed that the article mentioned that this new state of matter would allow the "invention" of maglev trains. Am I mistaken in thinking that various countries (definitely Japan and China, but also Germany, if I recall correctly) have maglev trains that they've been testing successfully for at least a decade?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
By the way, no one has so much as groaned at the stupid pun in my first post. What's up with *that*?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote: They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F -- which is the point at which matter stops moving.
They confined the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing up.
Now why didn't I think of that?
Posts: 383 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
I've also heard of a form of matter called a quark-gluon soup (that might just be a nickname for it). It was created in a particle accelerator by smashing some very heavy particles into a sheet of lead, I think. Everything is reduced to a very dense bunch of quarks and electrons, but the energy is high enough to keep the quarks from combining. Maybe I'll have to do a Google search on it.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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It's more properly called quark-gluon plasma, but from what I'm reading, I'm not quite sure whether it has actually been discovered yet. It seems that CERN did some experiments, but they weren't totally conclusive.
posted
Interesting. I once made a similar substance in the microwave when I accidentally left the plastic wrapper on the bag of popcorn.
Posts: 3056 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Interesting articles. The one from the BBC definitely indicates that they'd succeeded in creating quark-gluon plasma when it says "they have made a form of matter that has not existed for 15 billion years.", but the other two articles did phrase things more ambiguously.
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posted
Right now it's only availiable in chartreuse, but they're hoping to have other colors available in time for next Christmas.
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posted
Has anyone ever produced an effective braking system for maglev trains? It occurs to me that they could travel _VERY_ fast....
Posts: 1041 | Registered: Feb 2002
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I suspected as much.
