A team of physicists in Barcelona has
In a paper published Dec. 14 in the journal Science, researchers revealed that these bizarre droplets emerged in the strange, microscopic world of a laser lattice — an optical structure used to manipulate quantum objects — in a lab at the Spanish Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, or Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO). And they were true liquids: substances that maintain their volume regardless of external temperature and form droplets in small quantities. That's as opposed to gases, which spread to fill their containers. But they were far less dense than any liquid that exists under normal circumstances, and maintained their liquid state through a process known as quantum fluctuation.
The researchers cooled a gas of potassium atoms cooled to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), close to absolute zero. At that temperature, the atoms formed a Bose-Einstein condensate. That's a state of matter where cold atoms clump together and start to physically overlap. These condensates are interesting because their interactions are dominated by quantum laws, rather than the classical interactions which can explain the behavior of most large bulks of matter.
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