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---------------------------------- 2135 - ABSOLUTE ZERO - temperature?
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- There are at least six forms of matter. Everyone is familiar with three of them:
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- (1) gas
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- (2) liquid
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- (3) solid
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- A typical example would be cooling water vapor to a liquid and then to crystalline ice.
If we keep cooling and adjusting temperatures and pressures on matter we can come across three more forms of matter:
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- (4) plasma
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- (5) boson condensation
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- (6) fermionic condensation.
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- Request several other Reviews available that address much of the background for Absolute Zero. For this Review I hope you learn about the strange properties matter acquires as temperatures approach -273 C, or 0 degrees Kelvin.
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- Plasma is a form of matter that has lost its electrons and has become positively charged. The positively charged nuclei are called ions and the matter is said to be ionized. Typically, plasma is an ionized gas.
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- Strange as this sounds plasma is the most common form of matter in the Universe. 99% of the visible Universe is plasma, particularly in the stars and in the interstellar gas. Because plasma carries a positive charge it is strongly affected by electric and magnetic fields.
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- Plasma is the material that makes up the Sun. When you see solar flares you see the ionized plasma arching in loops following the Sun’s magnetic lines of force.
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- Other common appearances of plasma are in fluorescent bulbs, neon signs, the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and TV displays. The Plasma televisions use xenon and neon gas in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells.
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- When a voltage is applied the ionized gas rushes to the electrodes and collides emitting ultraviolet photons. The back of each cell is coated with a phosphor. The ultraviolet light emitted by the plasma excites the phosphors to give off colored light. Each cell is, in effect a fluorescent lamp.
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- We will continue to lower the temperature and expand our vocabulary to learn about the next two forms of matter. Bose Condensation and Fermionic Condensation are the freezing transition phase of Bosons and Fermions.
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- All known matter is made up of fundamental particles that are either Bosons or Fermions. Bosons are the “force carrying” particles such as photons for the electromagnetic force, W-Z-bosons for the Weak Force and Gluons for the Strong Force. Fermions are all the particles of ordinary matter such as electrons, protons, and neutrons (i.e.: Quarks).
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- The Bose Condensation, sometimes referred to as the Bose-Einstein Condensation, was named after Satyendranath Bose and Albert Einstein. These two physicists predicted the existence of Bose Condensation in 1924. Bose was born in Calcutta , India in 1894. He published his paper in 1924 claiming that atoms cooled to near Absolute Zero would lose all their kinetic energy and in effect become one super atom, a new form of matter.
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- In 1925 Einstein developed the quantum statistics that applied to this theory and to all bosons. By the way bosons were also named after Bose. This 5th state of matter was not actually produced in the laboratory until 1995, 70 years later, at the University of Colorado.
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- In 1926 Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac developed the quantum statistics for all fermions. Fermi was born in 1901 in Rome, Italy. He came to the United States in 1938 after receiving the Nobel Prize. Enrico was studying the neutron. Little did he know that it would also be called a fermion years later.
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- He is credited with inventing the first nuclear reactor, uranium fission, in 1942. He became part of the Manhattan Project and his invention became the atom bomb that was dropped on Japan.
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- Paul Dirac was born in 1902 in Bristo., Glouchestershire, England. In 1930 Dirac first suggested that there must be a positive twin to the electron because it showed up in his math. The positron was discovered 2 years later. Dirac received the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his prediction of antimatter. These two physicists worked out the quantum statistics for all fermions in 1926.
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- So, if you have a fundamental particle and it obeys the Bose-Einstein statistics than it is a boson. It you have a fundamental particle and it obeys the Fermi-Dirac statistics than it is a fermion.
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- The math that these physicists developed predicted the existence of these new forms of matter long before they were discovered. Years later they were discovered in the laboratories around the world. Super cooled Bose and Fermionic Condensations are a state of matter that displays some very strange behaviors. Here are some of them:
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- (1) Superfluids - have zero viscosity. The liquids can flow without friction. These condensations have zero entropy, and infinite thermal conductivity. It is impossible to set up a temperature gradient in these superfluids.
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- (2) Superconductors - have electrons that can flow with zero resistance. Electricity flows without producing heat, therefore there is no power loss. It is impossible to set up a voltage gradient across a superconductor. Physicists have observed electrical current flowing is a super conducting ring for over a year with no sign of resistance.
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- (3) Superfluids - super cooled Helium 4 in an open container at 2.186 Kelvin will flow up the sides of the container, overcome the force of gravity with capillary action and spread out across the table until it is only one atom thick.
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- (4) Diamagnetic - if you drop a bar magnet on top of the super conducting ring that is maintaining a persistent current the magnetic forces between the super conductor and the magnet are repulsive and sufficiently strong enough to support the magnet’s weight. If we could engineer super conducting rails we could magnetically levitate trains that could travel across the country at high speeds using almost no energy.
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- When Bose and Fermionic Condensations occur the atoms become one lattice of positive nuclei .01 to .04 nanometers apart. The electrons pair up each having opposite spins and are 100 nanometers apart. (The electron pairs are called Cooper Pairs.) The electrons produce a current on the surface of the material with zero resistance shielding the rest of the material from any magnetic field. (This diamagnetic behavior is called the Meissner Effect.)
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- (5) Slow the speed of light to a stop - A Harvard University team has slowed a light pulse down to 38 miles per hour in a cloud of sodium atoms cooled to near absolute zero. Two separate atomic clouds of sodium atoms are in states of Bose Condensation. A pulse of laser light is shown into one cloud. The slowly moving cloud travels toward the second cloud. The photons of light turn into matter according to E=mc^2. The clouds merge.
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- A second laser energizes the combined cloud and the original light pulse reappears. From a standing start the light returns to 186,282 miles per second and the lightwave reproduces the exact waveform of the original light beam. Sending light through a Bose Condensation might result in a whole new way of transmitting information, eliminating fiber optics, up/down converter IC’s, and electrical wires.
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- (6) Superfluids - have zero viscosity. If you put a Superfluid in a closed container and spin the container. The fluid will remain stationary until a certain spin velocity is reached, then it will very quickly begin spinning at that critical speed. The speed is quantisized - the fluid will only spin at certain speeds, otherwise, it remains stationary.
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- Much of the discoveries in super cooled matter come from the statistical nature of thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics state that heat always travels from the warmer body to the colder body, that all systems evolve to become more random, more disorderly, their entropy always increases.
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- Entropy can only flow in one direction. Time can only flow in one direction. These laws are due to statistics. If you break an egg it is not that it cannot be reassembled, it is just that it is highly unlikely. Time and entropy go in the direction they do because of the overwhelming likelihood that out of a random sequence of microscopic interactions less ordered situations will always result.
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- Entropy decreases as temperature decreases, but in a closed system entropy always increases. The state of maximum entropy is the state of thermal equilibrium. The Universe is always heading toward this state of maximum entropy.
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- So far the Universe has expanded and cooled to 2.73K. Is it possible that these other forms of matter already exist in outer space? Is it possible that the Universe will all of a sudden go through a condensation phase transition, changing the form of all matter? Will our world survive such a phase transition should it happen? Stay tunes there is still more to learn.
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- December 16, 2019. 2135 729
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--------------------- Monday, December 16, 2019 -------------------------
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