The Universe Revealed is my attempt to discuss more thoroughly the main questions that we humans should ask about our existence, our universe and our place in it. These are mostly my thoughts on science, religion and philosophy as it applies to the...
Just when you thought that quantum physics couldn't get any crazier, three physicists, David Thouless of the University of Washington, Duncan Haldane of Princeton University, and Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering a new state of matter.
As you might know, matter can exist as solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Now, it seems, that there is another form that matter can assume under unique conditions. It has many names but the best is 'Quantum Condensate'.
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Their discovery goes all the way back to 1980 when a German physicist Klaus von Klitizing discovered that when a thin section of silicon was supercooled and placed in a magnetic field, electricity could be conducted through it in precise whole amounts. Klitizing received the Nobel Physics prize for what was called the 'Hall' effect. At the time, it was thought that the thin piece of silicon had undergone a phase transition, but that was mathematically impossible because it was too thin for the atoms to move up and down.
The recent Nobel Prize winners thought otherwise. They said that the atoms were moving in a tornado-like vortex instead of moving up and down. The atoms create spinning blobs when cooled down to very low temperatures and that's what causes the phase transitions that enable electrical charges to conduct in precise whole amounts, a condition that would enable quantum computing. It's paramount to the idea of step-by-step transitions in matter.
All this proves that the quantum state of matter is even more exotic than once thought.
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And, another idea for a new state of matter is called 'quantum spin liquid'. This is a two dimensional material similar to graphite and it causes electrons, thought to be a indivisible building block of matter, to split into pieces that are called Majorana fermions. These exotic matter materials are thought to be hiding in magnetic materials. Researchers at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory under Arnab Banerjee discovered this and it matches up to a theoretical model, known as Kitaev model. Again, this idea could make a fast quantum computer possible.
