A 'Frustration Machine' Found a Brand-New Phase of Matter
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As scientists continue to explore the quantum world, the known number of phases of matter continues to grow.
The newest addition to the list is a chiral bose-liquid state, which scientists just observed for the first time.
Using powerful magnetic fields and a bilayer semiconducting device called a “frustration machine,” scientists successfully proved the existence of the phase of matter.
You’re probably familiar with your run-of-the-mill phases of matter—solids, liquids, and gasses. On the off chance you moonlight as an astronomer or nuclear physicist, the hot soup of positively charged ions known as plasma is probably on your radar, too. But once things go subatomic, states get strange.
There’s Bose-Einstein condensate, a collection of atoms cooled at just above absolute zero, and a phase of matter known simply as “time crystals.” Now, scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and China’s Nanjing University and Peking University have discovered a new form of matter named a “chiral bose-liquid state.” The results of this study were published last week in the journal Nature.
“You find quantum states of matter way out on these fringes,” UMass Amherst assistant professor and co-author Tigran Sedrakyan said in a press release, “and they are much wilder than the three classical states we encounter in our everyday lives.”
It’s in this Wild Quantum West where Sedrakyan and his team discovered their new state of matter. Typical particles act like bowling pins or billiard balls, meaning it’s easy to predict their movement when they’re struck by another particle. But in a frustrated quantum system, things operate by different rules and there are an infinite number of possible interactions between particles.
The researchers created a “frustration machine,” a bilayer semiconducting device designed to create this state of matter. The “machine” works by incorporating an electron-rich top layer (where electrons move freely) and a corresponding bottom layer with “holes” that electrons can occupy. Then, these two layers are brought with one atom-width of each other. Because of the purposeful imbalance between the number of electrons in the top layer and the number of holes in the bottom layer, the electrons become frustrated.
“It’s like a game of musical chairs designed to frustrate the electrons,” Sedrakyan says in a press release. “Instead of each electron having one chair to go to, they must now scramble and have many possibilities in where they ‘sit’”.
This creates a chiral bose-liquid state, which contains many unique properties. Chief among them is correlation among particles. When an outside particle collides with this state, all particles react in unison due to long-range entanglement, according to Interesting Engineering. Having never been observed until now, scientists had to employ extremely strong magnetic fields capable of capturing the movement of electrons as they “race” for their specific chairs.
So, what exactly have all these new forms of matter done for us lately? While further exploration of this state will help reveal new answers and further mysteries about quantum mechanics (specifically bosonic systems in solid states), this new state could provide a pathway for finding a more secure and reliable way to encode digital information.
The further down this quantum rabbit hole we go, the larger collection of phases of matter grows.
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