Posted on 12/06/2016 3:22:37 PM PST by BenLurkin
The ytterbium crystal was first synthesized a year ago by scientists in China, where the government in Beijing has invested heavily in hopes of creating synthetic quantum materials with novel properties. It appears they may have now succeeded, said Mourigal, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Physics.
"Imagine a state of matter where this entanglement doesn't involve two electrons but involves, three, five, 10 or 10 billion particles all in the same system," Mourigal said. "You can create a very, very exotic state of matter based on the fact that all these particles are entangled with each other. There are no individual particles anymore, but one huge electron ensemble acting collectively."
One of the only previously observed apparent quantum spin liquids occurs in a natural crystal called herbertsmithite, an emerald green stone found in 1972 in a mine in Chile. It was named after mineralogist Herbert Smith, who died nearly 20 years prior to the discovery.
Researchers observed its apparent spin liquid nature in 2012 after Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists succeeded at reproducing a purified piece of the crystal in their lab.
Because of its chemical makeup, herbertsmithite produces just one single entanglement scheme. Physics math says there must be myriads more.
"Finding herbertsmithite was like saying, 'animals exist.' But there are so many different species of animals, or mammals, or fish, reptiles and birds," Mourigal said. "Now that we have found one, we are looking for different kinds of spin liquids."
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
If the Chinese get the next secret superweapon, we are toast.
Um, this kind of interaction has been well known for quite a while. It is called superfluidity. Also had been previously observed in other substances cooled to near absolute zero. But academia is leftist, so they represent something we have known for decades as a “breakthrough” by communist China. Sigh.
Lol. Don’t worry. This is just a leftist academic rag that I used to respect trying to make China look good. I just dabble in this space and have known about these type of effects for over a decade. And some people I have worked with know FAR more than me.
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serve'em on your next pizza.
Didn’t Washington warn us about this:
Avoid foreign entanglements!
We will be first to procure unobtanium, I am sure.
Ouch!
Don’t worry. The Red Chinese will enslave these new particles just like they have done to their own people.
"What neutron scattering revealedPhysicists from the University of Tennessee succeeded in replicating the original ytterbium crystal, and Mourigal examined it at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where it was cooled down to a temperature of -273.09 degrees Celsius (0.06 degrees Kelvin).
The cooling slowed the natural motion of the atoms to a near stop, which allowed the researchers to observe the electron spins' dance around the Ytterbium (Yb) atoms in the YbMgGaO4 crystal. They used a powerful superconducting magnet to line the spins up in an orderly fashion to create a starting point for their observations.
"Then we removed the magnetic field, and let them go back to their special kind of wiggling," Mourigal said. His team carried out the observations at the ORNL Spallation Neutron Source, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility. SNS has about the power and size of a particle supercollider, and allowed the scientists to watch the concert of electrons' spins by bombarding them with neutrons.
Normally, when one electron flips its spin, researchers would expect it to create a neat chain reaction, resulting in a wave going through the crystal. The wave of electron spins flipping in sequence might look something like fans at a football game standing and sitting back down to make a wave go around the stadium.
But something odd happened. "This jumbly kind of spin wave broke down into many other waves, because everything is collective, everything is entangled," Mourigal said. "It was a continuum of excitations, but breaking down across many electrons at once.
It was qualitatively similar to what was observed using the same technique on herbertsmithite."
My head is spinning and my neurons are entangled.
they say they see these things it but never produce any pictures... i'd love to see them
When we can explain entanglement at a distance we will know there is no God. I am betting on God.
Aaaahhhhhhh.....
“Spin Liquid”
Whiskey.
“The room is spinning!”
“Don’t worry! It’s physics!”
Sounds like a Bose-Einstien condensate, which have been around for a while. With this spin liquid mention I thought of liquid helium three which forms wierd wirlpools as you get close to absolute zero.
Einstien-Bose condensates happen at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Even a little bit of light heats it up enough to destroy the condition. They probe it with small bursts of laser light , a billionth of a second flash. The Condensate slows down the light to just a few meters per second.
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