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Fifth State Of Matter 'SuperSolids' Confirmed By MIT, Which Is Crystalline And Superfluid At The Same Time.

Now forcoming student generation have to study one more state of matter namely " Supersolids ". The research was carried out at MIT, and was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office for Scientific Research, and the Army Research Office by the team headed by Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. The most important part of this research is that this material have superfluidity and solidity.

Interestingly he said that,

“If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.” 

 

“The hardest part was to observe this density modulation,” says Junru Li, an MIT graduate student who worked on the discovery. This observation was accomplished with another laser, the beam of which was diffracted by the density modulation. “The recipe for the supersolid is really simple,” Li adds, “but it was a big challenge to precisely align all the laser beams and to get everything stable to observe the stripe phase.”

 

Other Important FActs about Supersolids:

  1. The supersolid only exists at extremely low temperatures under ultrahigh-vacuum conditions.
  2. It has a collective rigid structure like a solid  and can flow without viscosity.

 

There are five known phases, or states, of matter: solids, liquids, gases, plasma and Bose-Einstein condensates. The main difference in the structures of each state is in the densities of the particles.

  1. Solids: In a solid, particles are packed tightly together so they are unable to move about very much.
  2. Liquids: In the liquid phase, the particles of a substance have more kinetic energy than those in a solid.
  3. Gases: Gas particles have a great deal of space between them and have high kinetic energy.
  4. Plasma: Plasma is not a common state of matter here on Earth, but may be the most common state of matter in the universe.
  5. Bose-Einstein condensates ( SuperSolids ).



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