New Form of Matter Melds Lasers, Superconductors 113
sterlingda writes "Physicists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a new form of matter that melds the characteristics of lasers and superconductors. The work introduces a new method of moving energy from one point to another as well as a low-energy means of producing a light beam like that from a laser. The new state is a solid filled with a collection of energy particles known as 'polaritons' that have been trapped and slowed using a technique similar to that used to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate. The work is published in the May 18 issue of Science (subscription required to read beyond the abstract)."
Woohoo... (Score:5, Funny)
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Ordinary Lasers, But More Efficient (Score:5, Interesting)
For laser-confinement fusion, you'd want that kind of energy savings.
Or SDI, or that ballistic missile interception laser mounted on that Boeing aircraft.
I'm even wondering if those desktop particle accelerators based on laser-wakefield effect wouldn't also benefit.
Anything that requires a high-power laser beam could benefit from this new polariton laser method. A turbine is already going round and round like a polariton, and is distinct from the discrete reciprocating motion of a piston, or the population inversion of electrons.
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Selective Laser Melting (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.mcp-group.com/rpt/rpttslm.html [mcp-group.com]
Selective Laser Melting. It's a relatively new rapid prototyping technology which uses laser beams to melt powdered metal or plastic, so that it can be formed layer-by-layer into 3D parts.
So this would be an example of what this polariton laser would be good for, because the polaritons can generate the laser much more efficiently than conventional electron population inversion. Your power requirements would be reduced by 90%, and possibly even more.
Seriously -- Advantages? Applications? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/5/17/1 [physicsweb.org]
So this thing is like a BEC, but it's made of "excitons" (electron-hole pairs) plus the photons causing the excitation. But these "polaritons" are so short-lived, I'm wondering what this invention could be practically used for. They're calling it a "quasi-equilibrium" system, because it's more of a dynamic equilibrium.
Could this "polariton condensate" be used to probe "quantum foam", or spacetime, or something? They've already said it's more energy efficient than a laser.
Surely something this exotic must be able to confer on us some useful ability, that it would have some practical application -- even if only for research purposes.
When I think of an exciton-photon combination as compared to electron inversion, then it reminds me of the difference between a turbine and a piston engine. This "polariton" thingy (exciton-photon combo) would be more efficient than the laser in a way that's analogous to how the turbine is more efficient than the piston explosion. I'd think that the key to maximizing its advantage is by stimulating the excitons with the highest energy photons possible. That way you're maximizing your energy savings from this more efficient process.
Hmm... so maybe it might be useful for laser-confinement fusion after all. Maybe it could be used for laser-based rapid-manufacturing, etc.
Whatever it is, you'd probably want it for a short-range application, due to the brief lifespan of the polaritons.
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Bozos will blow up this planet one day (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Bozos will blow up this planet one day (Score:4, Funny)
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If they ever start selling mini black holes on ThinkGeek im first in line.
Wow. That takes me back a few years. I remember reading a sci-fi short story (who's name/author I've long forgotten) about a kid who had a black hole kit - basically the future version of Sea Monkeys. It was in some kind of container and it had to be "fed" sand every day so it could become more and more supermassive and remain stable. After a certain period of time you were meant to stop "feeding" it and let it disappear over time via Hawking radiation. Of course this kid continued to feed it and it i
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Ya sarcastic bastard.
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Re:Bozos will blow up this planet one day (Score:5, Insightful)
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The other side of that coin is that the one thing that would really, really motivate space colonization efforts would be a planet-killing disaster. And, no, global warming is not a planet-killing disaster. Just ask the mosasaurs that used to live in Kansas.
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Instead, learn to profit while we destroy ourselves and planet earth and forget about spacewars.
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That's Bezos. He said Bozos. I had to read it twice myself.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050701_bezos_ plans.html [space.com]
One method of propulsion for spacecraft is to push them with lasers.
The advantages include not having to carry fuel with you.
I don't have enough of a handle on this new state of matter thingy to know if it's useful for that, but worth looking into further.
Is tfa claiming a 7th state of matter,
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Again, if it evaporates through Hawking Radiation unexpectedly slowly, so it can catch extra mass from anything, then we are screwd.
IANAS so corrections to my fears are welcome.
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Anyway, as for cosmic rays creating black holes, you might have a look at: Physical Review Online Archive Physical Review Online Arc [aps.org]
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But, it's the mass that's dangerous, not the black-hole-ness. If you create a black hole without the mass then what's going to pull stuff past the schwarzschild radius? If it has the mass of a few atoms that were crushed together to form a black hole, nothing else could get close enough to it to become part of the black hole
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In 10^-42 seconds, according to this article: A black hole ate my planet [kressworks.com]
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A black hole is just one of the many ways we might destroy the earth.
Face it, self destruction, and destroying the earth, is too profitable to stop.
In 100 years, when there are no more humans left, or just a few hundred thousand, this is when humans can talk about going into space.
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A black hole the mass of mars would act the same way as mars gravitationally. A black hole the size of mars would doom us all.
Re:Circus physics (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quote from Wikipedia on fermions: "Therefore fermions are usually related with matter while bosons are related with radiation, though the separation between the two is not clear in quantum physics"
Oh wait. I just saw your handle. You're still an undergrad. You'll understand eventually if you keep at it though most people quit even before they reach your level of ignorance.
Big Supersymmetry Fan, Eh? (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not sure
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Once past the range of a whole atom then everything truly is just a particle, with a waveform, which carries energy. The other characteristics which have been assigned to things like fermions, bosons, particulatrons, quarks, and mesofemimento-ulons have been kludges to make life easier for people who don't know how to refactor thei
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Out of curiosity, when you say things like that do you actually expect to be taken seriously by scientists here?
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Re:Big Supersymmetry Fan, Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're totally confusing spin with particle/wave duality, which makes one really wonder what the hell you are talking about. You may be impressing the moderators with your blatantly-incorrect usage of fancy techie-sounding words, but it's quite obvious to the physicists here that you have no clue what you're talking about. And the irony is that you're guilty of that 'whoring out' which you are accusing actual physicists of.
Your original quote misconstrued the nature of fermionic vs bosonic natures of quanta, which the GP clarified, and you resorted to a wikipedia quote, which is quite out of context.
Irrespective of particle-wave nature, photons are spin-1 bosons! Why the hell are you bringing particle/wave duality into the picture at all?
All I suggested is that, rather than pronouncing new unprecedented discoveries every month, maybe the physicists ought to look into solidifying their dual wave-particle of photons. They'll find that all these other "new particles" and "new forms of matter" fit neatly with a which has been established for at least fifteen years.
If you had an inkling of the physics research, including theoretical, simulational, and experimental, that goes on in "highly-correlated" condensed-matter systems, you'd understand that the framework for identifying the various quanta and behaviors are well-defined within the basic "standard model" for realizable laboratory conditions. And this has been well-understood for longer than 15 years, what exactly is this 15-year time frame you're quoting anyway?
What is interesting is how modern 'exotic' materials can exhibit quanta with different charge, spin, phonon, etc properties than 'plain vanilla' systems. See spin-charge separation in a Luttinger Liquid for an older example. Armchair scientists like you may prefer to use the recent buzzword of emergent behavior if you like, although I don't agree Laughlin's mindview on the whole field of emergence.
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You're telling me that fermions are not subatomic bundles of energy?
Subatomic? Bundle of energy? What the hell are you talking about? The ONLY property that defines whether a 'particle' is a fermion or not is whether it has half-integer spin. And the word 'particle' really refers to is a quantization, which can be any quantized excitation, doesn't mean subatomic.
/.ed Mastercard Commercial (Score:5, Funny)
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Funny man... cytologists don't use math!
Try again (Score:2)
Photon: Integer spin: Boson.
Electron: Half-integer spin: Fermion.
Hole: Half-integer spin: Fermion.
Electron-hole pair: Sum of two half-integer spins = integer spin: Boson.
So an electron-hole PAIR and a photon of the excitation energy hanging around in a crystal full of electrons can be duals - "flipping back-and-forth" or forming a quantum-indeterminancy of which it "really i
Re:Circus physics (Score:4, Interesting)
A phonon is a sort of derived particle. It isn't a fundamental particle in itself but it represents a quantized mode of vibration in a lattice of more fundamental particles. But as a quasiparticle it exhibits the same types of behavior as other particles subject to quantum mechanics.
Their classical analogue would be standing waves in a crystal lattice. These lose part of their classical wave-like character and become more particle-like when the vibrational energy in the crystal decreases to near zero. The vibrational energy at extremely low temperatures takes the form of a few phonons bouncing around in the crystal like free particles in a hollow box. Phonons are ultimately responsible for all conduction of sound and heat through solids.
A polariton [wikipedia.org] is apparently the coupling of a photon with one of these, and they're claiming to have gotten interesting collective behavior. I'm not sure if this is a "new state of matter" but we may get some cool toys out of it.
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I should have said this for insulators- in conductors the electrons are responsible for most conductivity.
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Everything nowdays goes into the media as a new kind of matter. You don't even need to use barions for that.
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The community "should spend some time" combining photons, fermions, gluons etc. because "it would probably make much of the math a lot simpler."
Ever heard of string theory? The community has been spending an ENORMOUS amount of time trying to combine this things into a common picture. And trust me - it doesn't make the math simpler. Just ask Ed Witten.
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It's such an easy way to win a Nobel Prize and have my name right up the
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I find the juxtaposition of those two statements to be hysterical. The fact that they can claim to have found (yet another) "new form of matter" is just another point in the indictment of how broken the Standard Model really is. The dirty secret is that the math happens to work and give some predictiv
Re:Circus physics (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you should actually read the scientific journal articles if you're serious about this, instead of reading the popular reviews which are by definition "dumbed down" such that non-PhD's can understand in layman's terms what is going on.
Did they really demonstrate a new form of matter? What did we have at one time? Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. We could have mixtures of the forms--like a suspension was a fine mixture of a liquid with a gas.
Did you actually read the JOURNAL article, or are you just extrapolating bullshit based on a popular science review of the actual journal article? If you actually didn't think physicists were 'whoring themselves out' your post would make you look significantly less ignorant.
You quote liquids and gases as being two distinct forms of matter, yet they're actually the same if you look on a phase-diagram plot. So why do you list them as being two separate phases?
Oh wait, that's right, you can go CONTINUOUSLY from liquid to gas, without any phase transition, along a proper thermodynamic trajectory of course! What makes them look like separate states of matter is whether you have a phase transition as you alter the system. And the phase-transition line (in pressure-temperature space) actually ends in a critical point (see here [chemicalogic.com], such that you can choose a proper p-T trajectory either WITH or WITHOUT the phase transition.
Would you call a superconductor a new state of matter? It certainly is quite different from the metallic state, with a well-defined phase transition as you cool below Tc. What about a Bose-Einstein Condensate? What about a phase-transition from superconducting-like nature to BEC? These have all been well studied, and all are acknowledged as states of matter.
The fact that you question whether it's a new state of matter, and you refer merely solid, liquid, gas, and plasma without any reference to phase transitions, really shows your limited understanding of this subject. And that makes it all the more humorous that you actually go on to claim physicists are whoring themselves out.
don't confuse the issues (Score:2)
"State of matter" doesn't really have a strict definition in terms of phase transitions: most phase transitions don't give rise to new states of matter, and one state of matter may be transformed into another one without a phase transition (as you yourself observe).
Important as this result may be
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However, regarding the 'state' itself, it refers to the collective
you're missing the point (Score:2)
Typically (i.e., to most people), a "state of matter" is regarded to be what people learn in school to be a state of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and sometimes plasma. That definition is what counts in a press release to the general public. If a press release talks about a "new state of matter", it implies that something has been added to that list, or at least obviously belongs on that
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Same in engineering. You gotta senstionalize it and get your funders excited about what you're doing. Then you get to do more and bring it to completion, hopefully making it usefull.
That's what happens when the government funding dries up and you have to cater to the private sector for funding. Even the public f
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As for combining particles, I think they may have thought about that. In fact, most of Quantum Physics began as a manner of s
Polaritons? (Score:2)
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And Star Trek is just a prime example of art imitating life. Most of those words do exist in the field. They're often used incorrectly to throw around science-y sounding terms, but would they continue to do it if it didn't actually sound like scientific jargon?
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I imagined you were joking, but this being Slashdot, I erred on the side of idiocy.
Energy Density of Polaritrons in Superfluid? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm also pleasantly surprised to read that Bell Labs is still doing basic science - urban legend was that went out with the AT&T breakup.
Oh, and if anybody from physorg.com is reading, there's a strange display thing going on where ", " is replaced by "-" (not even space emdash space) in many sentences, making clause boundries in the sentences appear awkwardly as pseudo-hyphenated words.
Applications? Laser Fusion? (Score:2)
What are its constraints and limitations? How much energy-density or power-density can it handle?
Since lasers are being used in experimental development of confinement fusion, and since this polariton-filled matter is supposedly more energy efficient, I'd wonder if this new matter could be used to facilitate laser-confinement fusion.
Or is it just meant for low-power applications?
DVD-players, maybe?
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It would seem to me that polaritrons would be short-lived and hence could only exist in certain conditions It would seem to me you might be able to use them for high-efficiency lasers. I don't know about superconductors though-- seems like the energy going in required to maintain the state would be a good way to negate the benefits from a superconductor....
Editor Foo! (Score:2, Insightful)
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No, they meant with the properties of a laser [beam]. The polaritons are coherent when they're confined, just* like photons are coherent in a laser beam.
Using specially designed optical structures with nanometer-thick layers-which allow polaritons to move freely inside the solid-Snoke and his colleagues captured the polaritons in the form of a superfluid. In superfluids and in their solid counterparts, superconductors, matter consolidates to act as a single energy wave rather than as individual particles.
I suppose saying "beam" or talking about the photons in the laser beam would have been slightly more clear to the people who didn't read the article, but it's hardly something poorly written enough to be complaining about.
IAA physicist and material scientist, but I don't know enough about superconductors to really make worthwhile comments on that analo
Polariton Lasers Are More Efficient (Score:3, Informative)
http://optics.org/cws/article/research/27439 [optics.org]
Again, a more energy-efficient laser sounds like it could be used for nuclear fusion, or even just for more energy efficient consumer electronics (eg. DVD players)
Isn't Laser-TV supposed to be coming out this Xmas? I'd read that Novalux is working on improving the power of their Necsel laser modules for that purpose. If polariton lasers are 10 times more efficient than laser diodes and can operate at room temp, then maybe they'd
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Shouldn't that be next tuesday?
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Why not go all the way? (Score:1, Funny)
Picky grammar... (Score:1)
Sounds like Techno-Babble (Score:1, Offtopic)