6 ms·
Unexpected data from the Large Hadron Collider suggest a new type of matter
- gliese1337 14y agoHere's the pre-print: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1210.5482 http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1210.5482
- gulbrandr 14y agoPlease post the URL of the original article: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/lead-proton-collisions-at-large-hadron-collider-yield-surprising-results-1127.html http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/lead-proton-collisions-at...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- stephengillie 14y agoSo this color-glass condensate is a very-high-energy type of matter. It goes on the list with: Solid Liquid Gas Plasma Glass Crystal Superfluid Supersolid Superglass Dark
- guscost 14y agoDark matter is still a hypothesis.
- gwillen 14y agoAt some point it becomes silly to keep adding 'phases of matter'. And if you want to be exhaustive, don't forget the other oddball types: the high-density states like neutronium, the high-energy states like quark-gluon plasma, etc.
- stephengillie 14y agoYou've got a good point, and there's lots of exotic types and in-betweens on Wikipedia which I didn't list. My list was to point out that we've named more than the 3 classical states of matter.
- Nursie 14y agoCoincidentally that's also next year's Pokemon game title list
- chimeracoder 14y agoSince when is glass (I assume we mean soda-lime glass) a separate phase of matter? My impression was that it was a solid, and that the myth that it's a highly viscous liquid was based off of incorrect analysis of stained glass windows, etc. that were more likely explained by imperfections in the production process.
- ajross 14y ago"Phases" are poorly defined. They exist wherever there's a statistical mechanics reason to define them, and they make sense only within the limits of the approximations on which they are based. Glass is "solid" to a mechanical engineer (in most regimes), but it's not a crystal and doesn't behave like one to a solid state physicist. Likewise "plasma" is a great tool to describe a fluorescent light bulb or lightning bolt, but not so much a white dwarf. Even stuff you think you understand, like "liquid and gas are clearly different" turns out to be wrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid).
- stephengillie 14y agoMy impression was also incorrect. Wiki says it's an "amorphous solid" aka one that doesn't form into crystals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass There's also Amorphous Ice, which is arranged in a "glass-like" form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_ice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_ice
- juiceandjuice 14y agoDark matter doesn't belong on that list.
- stephengillie 14y agoWhy not? Because the energy of which it's composed doesn't interact with photons?
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI was under the impression that the term "dark matter" was a stand-in term for something unknown that seems to contradict what we know about how gravity works at large distances.
- Almaviva 14y agoCosmologists will tell you more but it doesn't contradict how gravity works at large distances at all - we just see gravity working on something in a familiar way and don't know quite what it is.
- cristianpascu 14y agoActually, I think, we take it as if it's the gravity we know at work. We deduce the distribution of dark matter using the premise that dark matter is governed by the same gravity law. If the distribution is actually different or if there's something entirely different, but with the same observable effect, then...
- breadbox 14y agoNo, because if nothing else we don't actually know what it's composed of. It's entirely possible that it will turn out to be a new family of particles, for example. But more to the point, dark matter is certainly not made up of quarks and/or electrons (because it doesn't interact electromagnetically), so shoehorning it into a list of phases of "normal" matter is misleading at best, if not simply wrong.
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- danking00 14y agoEven though the MIT News Office subtitled the article with the phrase "new type of matter," could we please change the HN title to "new phase of matter"? Perhaps this is an Americanism, but a "new type of matter" suggests to me that we've found a new family of fundamental particles besides the quarks, the leptons, and the gauge bosons. What the article talks about is quite clearly a phase of matter called "color-glass condensate".