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Solid, Liquid, Gas....
By eetnoyer on 4/10/2008 10:08:34 AM , Rating: 5
Unless I'm missing something, where's the "new" state of matter?

RE: Solid, Liquid, Gas....
By JasonMick (blog) on 4/10/2008 10:19:23 AM , Rating: 4
Correct, normal states of matter are gas, liquid, solid, and plasma.

Less frequents states include quark-gluon plasma; Rydberg matter; Bose-Einstein condensates and fermionic condensates; quantum spin Hall state; degenerate matter; strange matter; superfluids and supersolids; and possibly string-net liquids.

A better term for superconductors/superinsulators would be material class or material phenomena when refering to the phenomena, not the material itself.

RE: Solid, Liquid, Gas....
By AlphaVirus on 4/10/08, Rating: 0
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don't forget "Dark Matter" (recently acknowledged)

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Hope that clears some things up :)

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A plasma is not an ionized gas.



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By Pottervilla on 4/10/2008 10:28:18 AM , Rating: 3
I believe that Levi picked that idea from the Argonne article

Superinsulation may sound like a marketing gimmick for a drafty attic or winter coat. But it is actually a newly discovered fundamental state of matter created by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with several European institutions.

I'm not sure I agree, but who am I to argue with a national laboratory?

RE: Solid, Liquid, Gas....
By Samus on 4/10/2008 12:15:14 PM , Rating: 2
I work at Argonne as a network engineer in the APS building (advanced photon source, or synchrotron ring) and this research was discussed in a conference last fall. I believe the University of Chicago 'CARS' Department is responsible for the discovery while x-raying an energy storage device. However, I could be confused because UChicago managed the Argonne facilities, so a lot of the time they get credit for other peoples discoveries, when in fact they only have 3 sectors on the ring (out of 36 I believe, some of which are run by IBM, DOE, DOD, etc)

RE: Solid, Liquid, Gas....
By pnyffeler on 4/10/2008 12:13:18 PM , Rating: 5
I can't really comment on whether a superinsulator would really be a "new" state of matter, but a superconductor clearly was.

Matter is composed of atoms, which are positively charged nuclei about which negatively-charged electrons circle in something akin to orbits of a planet. Atoms are pushed apart from one another (i.e. won't invade each other's space) because of the negative-negative repulsion of the electrons.

The orbit analogy of electrons is a misnomer. In fact, due to the bizarre effects of quantum mechanics, the "orbits" are actually standing waves, much like that in a resonating guitar string, except they are spherical and never die out.

With superconducting materials, as you cool the atoms, they end up having so little energy that they stop repulsing each other and come close enough that each atom's electron "orbits" overlap. When this happens, instead of crashing into one another, the orbit waves combine and add to one another. In this state, it is no longer a solid, liquid, or gas, but something more dense than a solid with crazy properties.

It's the combination of the electron orbitals that make the materials superconducting. Because an electron within an orbital/wave is moving at (almost) the speed of light, it can travel almost instantly from one end of the material to the other with no resistance. In effect, the electrons no longer "belong" to one atom, but instead are everywhere at once along the superconducting material.

I've never read about the superinsulator stuff, but it would appear that the same phenomenon is happening, except the coalescing waves are arranged in such a way that the electrons can never travel through the whole material. In other words, it's probable that superconducting and superinsulating materials are technically the same state of matter, with the distance between atom nuclei being smaller than orbital electron repulsion should classically allow, except in one, the coalesced electron waves allow free travel throughout the medium, while the other completely inhibits it.

Hope that makes sense...

RE: Solid, Liquid, Gas....
By JoshuaBuss on 4/10/2008 1:51:25 PM , Rating: 2
my understanding of what's going on leads me to believe you've hit the nail on the head. good post.

RE: Solid, Liquid, Gas....
By pnyffeler on 4/10/2008 3:48:54 PM , Rating: 2
I knew this Ph.D. would come in handy one day... :-)


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