6 ms·
Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter
- gjm11 7y agoOriginal MIT press release of which this is a word-for-word copy: https://news.mit.edu/2019/light-orders-exotic-material-1111 https://news.mit.edu/2019/light-orders-exotic-material-1111 Actual letter in Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0705-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0705-3
- Intermernet 7y agoSci-Hub link to pdf http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0705-3 http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019...
- swebs 7y agoWow, this makes way more sense than in the press release. Scihub is a treasure.
- dmix 7y agoI'm not from academia but is it unusual to have 21 authors on a paper?
- xaedes 7y agoMy observations: I rarely see it in computer science related papers. I often see it in biology / medicine papers (but I don't see lots of those papers) If you wonder what 21 people do for one paper, they have mentioned it in the paper pdf (look for the scihub link here in the comments) on the last page: Only two people actually wrote the paper with input from a lot of others, supervised by yet another one.
- motajaxxer 7y agoLab experiments involve huge amount of support people who have to do really specific work for each experiment.
- lostmyoldone 7y agoListed authors of reports are a bit like credits in film, and similarly, in fields/production where you have a lot of special-effects/complicated scientific apparatuses/huge custom built computer clusters for doing the analysis, you get a lot of supporting personell that you might want to credit. Oarticle physics papers sometimes list a huge number of authors, record I think is 5154 for a paper from an LHC collaboration titled "Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at √s=7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments" Nature wrote about it https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-more-than-5-000-authors-1.17567?utm_source=commission_junction&utm_medium=affiliate#/b1 https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-m...
- coldcode 7y agoJust when you think Physics has little left to discover, something you never expected creates a whole new avenue to explore. "When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science" - Max Planck
- jermaustin1 7y agoI don't think physics will ever be fully matured. There is always a "Why?" that needs an answer.
- hawkice 7y agoI'm not sure that "Why?" is always going to be a physics question, but certainly even after we understand the smallest building blocks, we will need specific models of arbitrarily complex systems where the basic rules are computationally infeasible or resistant to simple analysis. Of course, understanding the true and most basic workings of nature will also take a lot of work, just not a literally infinite supply.
- eru 7y agoThanks to chaos, we will probably have no shortage of computationally infeasible systems. Though the study of those systems is often labelled by something other than 'physics'. Biology or Chemistry or Psychology or Economics etc.
- cwkoss 7y agoWhat makes you think physics has little left to discover?
- cxcorp 7y ago> The idea that two possible states of matter might be in competition and that the dominant mode is suppressing one or more alternative modes is fairly common in quantum materials, the researchers say. This suggests that there may be latent states lurking unseen in many kinds of matter that could be unveiled if a way can be found to suppress the dominant state. How exciting! I can only daydream about the kind of discoveries to be found about matter in, say, 50 years.
- throw1234651234 7y agoI don't understand it enough to get excited - what are the potential applications?
- pm90 7y agoI don't think we can comment on any applications at this time. A lot of discoveries like these aren't exciting because of commercial potential, if that's what you mean by applications. As we discover more states and more properties of these states, as we develop technologies to persist these states for longer than a fleeting amount of time, we might discover interesting properties which may have commercial uses. Sometimes, the technologies developed to create/contain such exotic materials themselves tend to have commercial applications. That's how it is with the interplay of science and technology with the economy.
- anon73044 7y agoMy guess would be maybe in this new state, some metals might be more likely to alloy with others, so we'll have lots of fun new materials with strange properties. Maybe even find a new super conductor or two.
- haversine02 7y agoIn some materials, this hidden configuration might have interesting properties. It could even be (quasi)stable once the original pattern is suppressed. So, novel superconductors or metamaterials, maybe?
- AngryData 7y ago
- cosmic_quanta 7y agoNew phases of matter uncovered by ultrafast laser pumping is more common than you might think. Dumping a bunch of energy into a system in less than 30fs (30 x 10^-15s) creates a profoundly non-equilibrium situation. Whatever phase of matter you observe right after will likely have no equilibrium analogue. > The perpendicular version of the CDW that appears after the burst of laser light has never before been observed in this material, Gedik says. It "just briefly flashes, and then it's gone," Kogar says, to be replaced by the original CDW pattern which immediately pops back into view. The interesting bit is here: > Gedik points out that "this is quite unusual. In most cases, when you add energy to a material, you reduce order." That is what's great about this. New phases of matter in ultrafast experiments are old news.
- noobermin 7y agoIt's upsetting. Reminds me of when the CERN people made that paper about modulated plasma wave acceleration, and pretended they were the first to do it, or at least the popular press did. You only realize it when it's your field (as do I here) but we in physics ought to talk to each other more.
- cosmic_quanta 7y agoTo be fair, the authors are not claiming that this is the first time, only that this is the first time in this material. As you say, the press makes it up to be different than it is.
- pas 7y agoAnyone following science (or tech, or medicine, or anything) news will (ought to) realize how over-hyped and fluff-heavy every press release is. Real breakthroughs are very few and far between, because progress seems incremental. And because usually those breakthroughs are unseen, uninteresting, not even press-release worthy, because we haven't realized its potential. Then someone tries out that new thing for that old problem, and gets maybe decent numbers, usually just meh. Then slowly it builds, and then eventually comes the paradigm shift. But at that point it's the waiting game, slow march of better and better engineering, getting better trade offs, and so on.
- omg_science 7y agoYeah, "new phase of matter" is exactly how I'd classify a solid metal that has photo-electric properties under extremely specific lab conditions never observed in nature. Teach kids that there are now five phases of matter. Incredibly applicable to so many every day situations. Great. Thanks.
- redog 7y ago> "What if all you need to do is shine light on a material, and this new state comes into being?" Wonder if it's related to photosynthesis?
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoIt's not. Photosynthesis is a chemical reaction where light provides energy and that only involves gas, liquid and solid states of matter. These guys are talking about entirely different states of matter.
- classified 7y agoExciting. Could we build a laser-pulsed Charge Wave computer?
- gaze 7y agoHoly shit, Pablo is on fire!
- jblakey 7y agoLaugh-a while you can, monkey-boy.
- pressurefree 7y agoe=M*C^2 is a scalar value that lost information. a more general equation that preserves the information is actually a system of 3 equations that make a cube, that furthers the "color theory" into a more general, entangled case. the Energy cube is a loaf of bread, where one direction of sliced bread is momentum, another is impulse, and the third is E/me where mass of electron experiment bounds the real world constants as more than just ambiguous velocity information, when things are relative. the 3 axes then become dm, dx/dt, and int(adt). this is an 11 variable system, not including heat & entropy. as "things can be hard, strong or tough, they cannot be all three"... good luck. hidden shear energy seems likely
- hinkley 7y agoIs this going to end up having applications for integrated circuit manufacturing?
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoExcerpt: "In this material, a wavelike pattern of electrons in high- and low-density regions forms spontaneously but is confined to a single direction within the material. But when hit with an ultrafast burst of laser light—less than a picosecond long, or under one trillionth of a second—that pattern, called a charge density wave or CDW, is obliterated, and a new CDW, at right angles to the original, pops into existence. This new, perpendicular CDW is something that has never been observed before in this material. It exists for only a flash, disappearing within a few more picoseconds. As it disappears, the original one comes back into view, suggesting that its presence had been somehow suppressed by the new one." My thoughts: The first thought that comes to mind is "superposition"... The second thought that comes to mind is "possible higher-dimensional and/or phase-shifted view of the substructure of matter" (in this case, lanthanum tritelluride)... Even if neither of these things turn out to be the case, the phenomena is fascinating!