Physicists from the US and China have claimed that they have found an entirely new state of matter. So far, all of us encounter matter in three states - solid, liquid and gas. Researchers discovered the Chiral-Bose liquid state in the super-small quantum scale by bringing two layers of a special material very close together at very low temperatures (close to absolute zero). According to Science Alert, it is a system with built-in constraints that prevent particles from interacting as they might typically. In the quantum state, matter behaves in ways quite different from the three states that we are used to.
"It's like a game of musical chairs, designed to frustrate the electrons," Tigran Sedrakyan, a theoretical condensed matter physicist from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said about the discovery, as per the outlet.
"Instead of each electron having one chair to go to, they must now scramble and have many possibilities in where they sit," the researcher added.
The research has been published in the journal Nature.
Explaining the system designed by the researchers for the experiment, Science Alert said that researchers put together a semiconducting device with two layers - a top layer rich in electrons and a bottom layer with many available holes where electrons can go.
They then used a strong magnetic field to measure how the electrons moved, which then caused the Chiral-Bose liquid state to appear.
"On the edge of the semiconductor bilayer, electrons and holes move with the same velocities," physicist Lingjie Du from Nanjing University in China said about the path-breaking discovery.
"This leads to helical-like transport, which can be further modulated by external magnetic fields as the electron and hole channels are gradually separated under higher fields," the physicist added.
The researchers also listed the "interesting" new properties they found in the new state of the matter. Thy saw electrons freezing into a predictable pattern at absolute zero, which cannot be interfered with by other particles or magnetic fields.
The physicists said this stability could have applications in quantum-level digital storage systems.
