Fermidable

In a team led by Wolfgang Ketterle, a nobel laureate, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) scientists have been the first to create "a new type of matter", a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity. A superfluid gas can flow without resistance and can only rotate when it forms vortices similar to miniature tornados. The study of superfluids may offer some solutions to remaining questions on high-temperature superconductivity which has widespread applications for magnets, sensors and the energy-efficient transport of electricity. In order to view these vortices, the team needed extremely cold temperatures at which the fermionic gas was cooled to 50 nanokelvin. "It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalised by the density of the particles," stated Ketterle. "We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever." The superfluid Fermi gas created can also serve as an easily controllable model system to study properties of much denser forms of fermionic matter, e.g. solid superconductors, neutron stars, or the quark-glucon plasma that existed in the early universe.