Stanford physicists make new form of matter

The laser-cooled quantum gas opens exciting new realms of unconventional superconductivity. By Max McClure Within the exotic world of macroscopic quantum effects, where fluids flow uphill, wires conduct without electrical resistance and magnets levitate, there is an even stranger family of "unconventional" phenomena. These effects often defy explanation by current theoretical physics, but hold enormous promise for the development of such futuristic technologies as room-temperature superconductors, ultrasensitive microscopes and quantum computation. Much of the confusion surrounding the field is due to the sorts of materials that exhibit unconventional superconductivity. These substances are made up of strongly interacting fermions, a class of particles that are often very difficult to understand on the quantum level. Last week's announcement by a Stanford team in Physical Review Letters that it has created the world's first dipolar quantum fermionic gas from the metal dysprosium - "an entirely new form of quantum matter," as Stanford applied physics Professor and lead author Benjamin Lev put it - represents a major step toward understanding the behavior of these systems of particles. And this understanding makes for a leap toward the supernatural-seeming applications that condensed-matter physics conjures.