You’re familiar with the states of matter we encounter every day, such as solid, liquid and gas, but new states can emerge in more exotic and extreme conditions, and scientists in the US and China discovered one earlier this year. They call this the chiral Bose liquid state, and as with every new arrangement of particles we discover, it can tell us more about the structure and mechanisms of the universe around us, especially the ultrasmall quantum. scale.

States of matter describe how particles can interact with each other to form structures and different behaviors. Lock the atoms in place and you have a solid. Let them flow, you have a liquid or gas. Push paid partnerships, you have plasma. The quantum landscape provides even stranger ways for particles to interact, enabling unique behaviors best described in terms of potential and energy.

Researchers have discovered a new state through a hindered quantum system. Simply put, it is a system with built-in constraints that prevent particles from interacting as they normally would (hence the frustration). These limitations and the resulting frustrations can create exciting consequences for scientists. Here, the researchers focused on electrons and used the analogy of a party game to explain what was happening.

“This is like a game of musical chairs designed to disrupt electrons,” said Tigran Sedrakian, a theoretical condensed matter physicist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Instead of every electron having a seat to go to, they now have to compete and have many options where they sit.”

The researchers created a two-layer semiconductor device: an electron-rich upper layer and a lower layer with many accessible holes through which electrons can flow naturally. Return? There are not enough holes for all the electrons.

Although such a system is difficult to observe, the team used an ultra-strong magnetic field to measure how electrons move, revealing the first evidence of a new chiral Bose liquid state.

“At the edge of the semiconductor double layer, electrons and holes move at the same speed,” said Linjie Du, a physicist at Nanjing University in China. “This results in a helix-like transport that can be further modulated by external magnetic fields as the electron and hole channels gradually separate under higher fields.”

This new situation revealed some very interesting features. For example, electrons will freeze in a predictable pattern and a fixed spin direction at absolute zero and cannot be disturbed by other particles or magnetic fields. This stability may have applications at the quantum level in digital storage systems.

At most, foreign particles affecting one electron can affect all electrons in the system due to quantum entanglement over a relatively long distance. It’s like hitting a cue ball into a bunch of billiard balls, and all of those balls in response move in the same direction; Another discovery that might be useful. While these all involve very high levels of physics, each of these types of discoveries—those oddities and extremes that occur outside the normal interactions of particles—brings us closer to a full understanding of our world.

“You find your way out of quantum states of matter at these edges, and they’re much crazier than the three classical states we encounter in everyday life,” Sedrakian said. Source