A New Form of Matter 2 - Fermionic Condensates

Researchers have discovered a weird new phase of matter called fermionic condensates.

We learned it in grade school. There are three forms of matter: solids, liquids and gases.

But that's not even half right. There are at least six: solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, and a new form of matter called "fermionic condensates" discovered by NASA-supported researchers.

"This is a very exciting time," says University of Colorado/NIST physicist Deborah Jin, lead scientist for the group who produced the first fermionic condensate in Dec. 2003. "My group works extremely hard these days. Both the excitement of a major advance and the competition to be first have been driving forces."

Most second graders can recite the properties of ordinary solids, liquids, and gases. Solids resist deformation. They're stiff and they can crumble. Liquids flow, they're hard to compress, and they assume the shape of their container. Gases are less dense, they're easy to compress, and they not only assume the shape of their container ... they expand to completely fill it.

News of their landmark achievement appeared in the January 24-30th 2004 online edition of Physical Review Letters.

Copyright Markus Greiner. More False-colour snapshots of a growing fermionic condensate.

The fourth form of matter, the plasma, is gas-like, made of atoms that have been ripped apart into ions and electrons. The sun is made of plasma, as is most of the matter in the universe. Plasmas are usually very hot, and you can keep them in magnetic bottles.

The fifth form, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), discovered in 1995, appears when scientists refrigerate particles called bosons to very low temperatures. Cold bosons merge to form a single super-particle that's more like a wave than an ordinary speck of matter. BECs are fragile, and light travels very slowly through them. (Read "A New Form of Matter" to learn more about BECs.)