A new phase of matter has been discovered by a team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, as announced in the journal Nature. The discovery, called the “chiral Bose-liquid state,” opens up a new path in the ongoing effort to understand the nature of the physical world.
Under normal conditions, matter can exist as a solid, liquid, or gas. However, when exploring temperatures approaching absolute zero, objects smaller than a fraction of an atom, or those with extremely low states of energy, the world appears very different. Sedrakyan explains that “you find quantum states of matter way out on these fringes, and they are much wilder than the three classical states we encounter in our everyday lives.”
Sedrakyan has spent years studying these wild quantum states, with a particular interest in the possibility of “band degeneracy,” “moat bands,” or “kinetic frustration” in strongly interacting quantum matter.
In any system, particles typically collide with each other, causing predictable effects. However, in a frustrated quantum system, infinite possibilities arise from the interaction of particles, leading to novel quantum states. Sedrakyan and his colleagues have engineered a frustration machine: a bilayer semiconducting device. The top layer is electron-rich, and the bottom layer is filled with “holes” that a roving electron can occupy. The two layers are brought extremely close together, interatomic close.
2023-06-14 19:30:04
Original from phys.org rnrn
