You're familiar with the states of matter we encounter daily – such as solid, liquid, and gas – but in more exotic and extreme conditions, new states can appear, and scientists from the US and China just found one.

You’re familiar with the states of matter we encounter daily – such as solid, liquid, and gas – but in more exotic and extreme conditions, new states can appear, and scientists from the US and China just found one.

They’re calling it the chiral bose-liquid state, and as with every new arrangement of particles we discover, it can tell us more about the fabric and the mechanisms of the Universe around us – and in particular, at the super-small quantum scale.

  • Bird_On_Biff@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I read the article, but one thing I don’t get: if this were done on a larger scale what would this state of matter look like to us? Like how similar to a liquid would it be?

  • itsAsin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    chiral bose-liquid state

    i am aware of arguments against abiogenesis that insist on a “creator” because a biochemical soup cannot independently select in favor of chirality. and yet, biology is clearly selected in favor of the Levo-handed amino acids.

    it is interesting to see in the published drawing above that electrons in this state form a chiral vortex similar to the bio-skeletal aromatic ring. in this way, this newly discovered quantum structure can contribute to our understanding of abiogenesis.

    👍

    • skillissuer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      because a biochemical soup cannot independently select in favor of chirality.

      it absolutely can, it just does so randomly. there are reactions that can amplify that random enantiomeric excess, and then, with exponential growth of one form, you need to be lucky only once

      the first source of chirality could have been a particular piece of char https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAH_world_hypothesis

      this material behaves chirally only in strong magnetic field. this is completely unrelated to abiogenesis