The classical states of matter are usually summarized as: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.
A gas, for example, can be ionised at high temperatures to form a plasma. In 1995, researchers were able to prove that a fifth state of matter could be created at very low temperatures — the Bose-Einstein condensate.
boson. [ bō′sŏn ] Any of a class of elementary or composite particles, including the photon, pion, and gluon, that are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle (that is, any two bosons can potentially be in the same quantum state). The value of the spin of a boson is always an integer.
To make a Bose-Einstein condensate, you start with a cloud of diffuse gas. Many experiments start with atoms of rubidium. Then you cool it with lasers, using the beams to take energy away from the atoms. After that, to cool them further, scientists use evaporative cooling.
In addition to the three standard states of matter — solid, liquid, and gas — there's a higher-energy state of an ionized plasma, arising wherever atoms and molecules have too few electrons to be electrically neutral.
Hau and her team have previously shown that a Bose-Einstein condensate — which they make here by cooling sodium atoms to about 600 billionths of a degree (colder than deep space) — can slow down a light beam and even bring it to a standstill. So one of these pulses fits comfortably inside the cloud, Hau says.
Getting into direct contact with extremelly cold things can seriously injure or even kill. But BEC is practically not dangerous. If you were to get into contact with a cloud of BEC, your body heat would heat up the cold matter in no time, effectivelly destroying the condensate.
Abstract. This chapter introduces plasma as a fourth state of matter and describes the main plasma properties relevant for biomedical applications. Plasma can be defined broadly as an ionized gas. There are weakly ionized gases and strongly ionized gases.
There are at least six: solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, and a new form of matter called "fermionic condensates" just discovered by NASA-supported researchers.
Einstein generalized Bose's theory to an ideal gas of identical atoms or molecules for which the number of particles is conserved and, in the same year, predicted that at sufficiently low temperatures the particles would become locked together in the lowest quantum state of the system.
The Sun is our nearest star. It is, as all stars are, a hot ball of gas made up mostly of Hydrogen. The Sun is so hot that most of the gas is actually plasma, the fourth state of matter. The first state is a solid and it is the coldest state of matter.
Densest Matter Created in Big-Bang Machine
- A superhot substance recently made in the Large Hadron Collider (pictures) is the densest form of matter ever observed, scientists announced this week.
- Known as a quark-gluon plasma, the primordial state of matter may be what the entire universe was like in the immediate aftermath of the big bang.
