10 unusual states of matter - list verses (2023)

Most people can easily name the three classic states of matter: liquid, solid and gas. Those who have taken a few more science courses will add plasma to this list. But over the years, scientists have expanded our list of possible states of matter well beyond the big four. Along the way, we learned a lot about the Big Bang, lightsabers, and a secret state of matter that lurks inside the humble chicken.

10amorphous solids

Amorphous solids are an intriguing subset of the well-known solid. In a normal solid object, the molecules are highly organized and cannot move very freely. This gives the solid a high viscosity, which is a measure of the flow resistance. Liquids, on the other hand, have a disorganized molecular structure that allows them to flow past one another, splash, and take on the shape of the container they are in. Halfway between these two states of matter is an amorphous solid. In a process known asglazing, a liquid cools and its viscosity increases to the point that it no longer flows like a liquid, but its molecules remain disordered and do not form a crystallized structure like a normal solid.

The most common example of an amorphous solid.it is glass. For thousands of years, humans have made glass from silica. When glassmakers cool silica from its liquid state, it doesn't actually solidify when it falls below the melting point. As the temperature drops further, the viscosity increases, making it appear solid. However, the molecules still retain their disorganized structure. At this point the glass becomes an amorphous solid. This transitional process has allowed artisans to create beautiful and surreal thingsThe glass sculpture.

So what is the functional difference between an amorphous solid and a normal solid? Not much in everyday life. Glass appears perfectly solid until you look at it at the molecular level. And don't be fooled by the myth that glassflows like liquidfor long periods. Lazy tour guides like to perpetuate this myth by displaying old glass in churches, which often looks thicker towards the bottom, but that's actually due to imperfections in the glassmaking process, resulting in uneven glass that was naturally placed in the window with the thicker side. In the background. While it might not be very exciting to watch, the study of amorphous solids like glass has given researchers new insights into phase transitions and molecular structures.

9supercritical fluids

Most phase transitions take place under certain temperature and pressure parameters. Everyone knows that increasing the temperature will eventually turn a liquid into a gas. However, as the pressure increases along with the temperature, the liquid makes the jump to the region ofsupercritical fluids, which have both the properties of a gas and a liquid.

For example, supercritical fluids can permeate solids like a gas, but also act like a liquid as a solvent. Interestingly, depending on the combination of pressure and temperature, a supercritical fluid can be adjusted more like a gas or more like a liquid. This has allowed scientists to develop a wide variety of applications for supercritical fluids, ranging from the extreme to the mundane.

Although supercritical fluids are not as common as amorphous solids, you are likely to interact with them as often as you do with glass. Supercritical carbon dioxide has found favor with brewers for its ability to act as a solvent in hop extraction, while coffee companies use it to produce betterdecaffeinated coffee. Supercritical fluids have also been used to achieve more efficient hydrolysis and allow power plants to operate at higher temperatures. For a state of matter no one has heard of, you probably use supercritical fluid byproducts every day.

8degenerate matter

While amorphous solids occur at least on planet Earth, degenerate matter only exists within certain types of stars. Degenerate matter is when the external pressure of matter isnot temperature dependent, as on Earth, but through complex quantum principles, mostly the Pauli exclusion principle (more on that in a moment). Because of this, the outward pressure of degenerate matter would persist even if the temperature of the matter dropped to absolute zero. The two main types of degenerate matter are known as electron degenerate matter and neutron degenerate matter.

Electron-degenerate matter is mainly found in white dwarf stars. Matter forms in the star's core as the weight of matter around the core tries to compress the electrons in the core to their lowest energy state. However, according to the Pauli exclusion principle, two such particles cannot have the same energy state. Therefore, the particles "push" the material around the core, creating an outward pressureQuantengesetzewhich dictates that not all electrons in the nucleus can exist in the lowest energy state. This can only persist if the star's mass is less than 1.44 times that of our Sun. If a star is above this limit (known as theChandrasekhar border) will simply collapse into a neutron star or black hole.

When a star collapses into a neutron star, it no longer has degenerate electron matter, but instead consists of degenerate neutron matter. Because a neutron star is so heavy, electrons fuse with protons in the nucleus, creating neutrons. Free neutrons (neutrons not bound to an atomic nucleus) typically have a half-life of10.3 minutes. But at the core of a neutron star, the star's mass allows neutrons to exist outside of a core and form degenerate neutron matter.

Other exotic forms of degenerate matter may exist, including strange matter that may exist in a rare stellar form called a quark star. Quark stars are the step between a neutron star and a black hole, where the quarks in the core are decoupled and form a soup of free quarks. We have not yet observed these types of stars, but physicists continue to theorize about their existence.

7super fluid

Let's go back to Earth to talk about superfluids. A superfluid is a state of matter that exists when certain isotopes of helium, rubidium, and lithium are cooled to near absolute zero. This is similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), but there are slight differences. Some Bose-Einstein condensates are superfluid and some superfluid are Bose-Einstein condensates, but not all of each class fit into the others.

The most common superfluid is liquid helium. When the helium cools down to the "lambda point" of 2.17 degrees Kelvin, it becomes part of the liquidbecomes a super liquid. When most substances are cooled to a certain point, the attraction between the atoms overcomes the thermal vibrations in the substance, allowing the substance to form a solid structure. But helium atoms interact so weakly with each other that it can remain liquid down to absolute zero. In fact, at this temperature, the properties of individual atoms overlap, giving rise to the strange properties of superfluids.

First of all, a super liquid doesn't have anyintrinsic viscosity. Superliquids placed in a test tube begin to rise up the sides of the tube, apparently violating the laws of gravity and surface tension. Liquid helium escapes very easily as it can escape through any microscopic hole. Superliquids also exhibit strange thermodynamic properties. They have no thermodynamic entropy and are infinitely thermally conductive. This means that two superfluids cannot have a thermal differential. When heat is introduced into a superfluid, it propels it so fast that thermal waves are produced, a property not found in normal fluids.

6Bose-Einstein condensate

Bose-Einstein condensates are probably one of the most famous dark forms of matter, but also one of the most difficult to understand. First we need to understand what bosons and fermions are. A fermion is a half-spin particle (like an electron) or a compound particle (like a proton). These particles obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which makes electron-degenerate matter work. However, a boson has an integer spin, and multiple bosons can occupy the same quantum state. Bosons include all force-transmitting particles (such as photons) as well as some atoms, including our friend helium-4 and other gases. Elements in this category are known as bosonic atoms.

In the 1920s, Albert Einstein used the work of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose to propose a new form of matter. Einstein's original theory was that if you cooled certain elementary gases to a fraction of a Kelvin above absolute zero, their wavefunctions would merge into a "superatom". Such a substance would show quantum effects at the macroscopic level. But it wasn't until the 1990s that the technology to sufficiently cool items to the required temperature became available. In 1995, researchers Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman succeeded2000 atoms fuseinto a Bose-Einstein condensate large enough to be seen under a microscope.

Bose-Einstein condensates are closely related to superfluids, but they have their own unique properties. The most shocking thing is that a BEC can reduce the speed of light from its normal speed of 300,000 meters per second. In 1998, Harvard researcher Lene Hau succeeded in reducing the speed of light to a minimum60 kilometers per hour(37 mph) by shooting a laser through a cigar-shaped sample of BEC. In subsequent experiments, Haus' team managed to completely stop light in a BEC byTurn off the laserwhen it went through the test. These experiments have opened up completely new fields of light-based communication and quantum computing.

5Jahn-Teller Metales

Jahn-Teller Metals is the newer kid on the state of matter block, with researchers only successfully creating them in 2015. If confirmed by other labs, the experiment could change the world as we know it, since Jahn-Teller Metals has both insulating and superconducting properties.

Researchers led by chemist Kosmas Prassides experimented by taking carbon-60 molecules (colloquially known as bucky balls) and introducing rubidium into the structure, forcing the carbon-60 molecules to do sotake on a new form. The metal is named after the Jahn-Teller effect, which describes how pressure can change the geometric shape of molecules into new electronic configurations. In chemistry, pressure is not only achieved by compressing something, it can also be achieved by adding new atoms or molecules to an already existing structure, thereby changing its fundamental properties.

When the Prassides research team began incorporating rubidium into carbon-60 molecules, the carbon molecules turned from an insulator into a superconductor. However, due to the Jahn-Teller effect, the molecules tried to stay in their old configuration, creating a substance that looks like an insulator but has the electrical properties.by a superconductor. The transition between an insulator and a superconductor had never been seen before these experiments.

The really exciting thing about Jahn-Teller metals is that they become superconducting at high temperatures (-135 degrees Celsius instead of -243.2 degrees Celsius). This brings them closer to a manageable level for mass production and experimentation. If the claims are true, we're much closer to mass-producing materials that conduct electricity without resistance, without releasing heat, sound, or energy, revolutionizing power generation and transportation.

4photonic matter

For decades, the conventional wisdom behind photons was that they were massless particles that did not interact with each other. In recent years, however, researchers at MIT and Harvard have discovered new ways of making light appear to have mass, and even "light molecules“, which bounce off each other and stick together. If that sounds boring, consider that it's essentially the first step in making a lightsaber.

The science behind photonic matter is a bit complex, but stay tuned. (Remember,lightsabers.) Researchers began to create photonic matter through experiments with supercooled rubidium gas. When a photon is shot through the gas, it deflects and interacts with the rubidium molecules, losing energy and slowing down. Finally, the photon emerges from the gas cloud much more slowly, but with its identity intact.

Things start to get weird when you shoot two photons through the gas, causing a phenomenon known as Rydberg blocking. When an atom is excited by a photon, neighboring atoms cannot be excited to the same extent. Essentially, the excited atom stands in the way of the photons. So that a surrounding atom is excited by the second photon, the first photonmust advancethrough the gas. Photons don't normally interact with each other, but when confronted with a Rydberg block, they push each other through the gas, exchanging energy andinteract with each otherBy the way. From the outside, these photons appear to have mass and appear as a single molecule, although they are still massless. As photons emerge from the gas, they appear to be bound together, like a lightweight molecule that can be bent and shaped.

Practical applications of photonic matter are still a long way off, but researcher Mikhail Lukin already has a whole list of possible applications, ranging from computing to making three-dimensional crystals entirely from light to making light sabers.

3disturbed hyperuniformity

When deciding whether a substance is a new state of matter, scientists look at the structure of the substance and its properties. In 2003, Salvatore Torquato and Frank H. Stillinger of Princeton University proposed a new state of matter known asdisturbed hyperuniformity. While this might sound like an oxymoron, the idea was that the new kind of matter would appear messy up close, but hyper-uniform and structured over a wide area. Such matter would have the properties of both a crystal and a liquid. At first this only seemed to occur in simple plasmas and our liquid hydrogen, but recently researchers have found a natural example in the most unlikely places:a corn.

Chickens have five cones for their eyes. Four detect color and one detects luminous intensity. However, unlike the human eye or the hexagonal eyes of insects, these cones appear to be scattered randomly with no real order. This is because the cones in a chicken's eye have a restricted zone around them that doesn't allow two cones of the same type to be placed next to each other. Because of the exclusion zone and the shape of the cones, they cannot form an ordered crystalline structure (like we find in solids), but when all the cones are considered as a whole, it turns out that they actually have a very, very crystalline structure .ordered. pattern as you can seeIn these photosfrom princeton So we can call the cones in the corn liquid up close and solid from a distance. This differs from the previously mentioned amorphous solids in that a hyperuniform material acts like a liquid, while an amorphous solid does not.

Scientists are still studying this new state of matter, which is actually more common than originally thought. Researchers from Princeton are currently investigatingUse of hyper-uniform materialsto create self-assembling structures and light detectors that target very specific wavelengths.

2thread mesh liquid

What state of matter is the vacuum of space? Most people haven't given the question much thought, but over the past decade, MIT's Xiao-Gang Wen and Harvard's Michael Levin have proposed a new state of matter that may hold the key to discovering fundamental particles beyond the electron.

The path leading to the development of the liquid string lattice model began in the mid-1990s when a team of scientists proposed what they called "quasiparticles," which appeared to arise in an experiment in which electrons passed between two semiconductors. This caused quite a stir because the quasi-particles behaved as if they had a fractional charge, which was common in physics at the timeconsidered impossible. The team took this data and proposed that the electron was not a fundamental particle of the universe and that there were other fundamental particles that we hadn't discovered yet. Their work earned them the Nobel Prize, but it was later discovered that their results were caused by an error in the experiment. The idea of ​​a "quasi-particle" disappeared.

But some researchers didn't give up entirely. Wen and Levin took up work on "quasi-particles" and proposed a new state of matter known as a lattice of filaments. This state of matter would have quantum entanglement as a fundamental property. As with disordered hyperuniformity, if you look closely at a filamentary lattice, it appears that it contains a disordered set of electrons. However, looking at the overall structure, one sees that it is highly ordered due to the quantum entanglement properties of electrons. Wen and Levin later expanded their work oninclude other particlesand entanglement properties.

As computer models of the new state of matter were executed, Wen and Levin found that the end of a web of threads could create the various subatomic particles we have come to love, including the fabled "quasi-particle." Even more shocking, they found that the vibrations of the networks of strings obeyed Maxwell's equations, which govern light. In their work, Wen and Levin proposed that space is filled with networks of intertwined chains of subatomic particles and that the ends of these "strings" are the subatomic particles we see. They also suggested that this fluid web of threads allows light to exist. If the vacuum of space were filled with a liquid thread network, it would allow us to unite matter and light.

This may all sound far-fetched, but in 1972 (decades before the string net was proposed), geologists in Chile discovered a rare mineral known as herbertsmithite. Inside the mineral, the electrons form triangular structures, which seems to contradict what we know about how electrons interact with each other. However, this triangular structure is predicted by the string network model, and the researchers worked with artificial Herbertsmithite to try to prove that the model is accurate. Unfortunately thethe jury is still pendingwhether this theoretical state of aggregation actually exists.

1Quarks–Gluonen plasma

For our latest dark matter state, let's take a look at the state of matter we all started out in: quark-gluon plasma. In fact, the early universe was in a completely different state of matter than our classical states. But first a bit of history.

Quarks are the elementary particles that we find in hadrons (like protons and neutrons). Hadrons consist of three quarks or one quark and one antiquark. The quarks have partial charges and are held together by gluons, which are the exchange particles of the strong nuclear force.

We don't see free quarks in nature, but free quarks and gluons existed for a millisecond shortly after the Big Bang. During this time the temperature of the universe wasvery hotthat quarks and gluons hardly interacted with each other while traveling at nearly the speed of light. At that time, the universe consisted entirely of ithot plasma of quarks and gluons. In another split second, the universe would have cooled enough for heavy particles like hadrons to form, and quarks began interacting with gluons and each other. From that point on, the universe as we know it began to form, with hadrons combining with electrons to create primitive atoms.

In the current phase of the universe, scientists have tried to model the plasma of quarks and gluons in large particle accelerators. During these experiments, heavy particles like hadrons collide and create temperatures that allow itto decouple quarksfor a short period of time. From these early experiments we have already learned about some properties of the quark-gluon plasma, which appeared to be smooth and closer to a liquid than our normal understanding of plasmas. As researchers continue to experiment with this exotic state of matter, we will learn more and more about how and why our universe formed the way it did.

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fact confirmed byJaime Frater