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Confirmed: New phase of matter is solid and liquid at the same time
Solid, liquid, gas … and something else? While most of us learn about just three states of matter in elementary school, physicists have discovered several exotic varieties that can exist under extreme temperature and pressure conditions.
Now, a team has used a type of artificial intelligence to confirm the existence of a bizarre new state of matter, one in which potassium atoms exhibit properties of both a solid and a liquid at the same time. If you were somehow able to pull out a chunk of such material, it would probably look like a solid block leaking molten potassium that eventually all dissolved away.
“It would be like holding a sponge filled with water that starts dripping out, except the sponge is also made of water,” says study coauthor Andreas Hermann, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Edinburgh whose team describes the work this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday April 17 2019, @03:37AM
This is roughly how most of the planet is. The mantle which makes up 67% of the planet's mass is solid but flows like a liquid. There's also fractional melting, where some of the chemicals melt leaving others behind, and fractional melting, where lava freezes into different minerals as it flows and cools.
Based on the summary, it sounds like they discovered fractional melting with elemental matter, where some of the atoms stay in a solid structure and the rest "melt" out of it. This isn't any different from a solid chunk of mantle melting off certain minerals, yet still remaining solid albeit chemically changed. Of course, the difference is that this is happening with a single element, so it's probably relying on the molecular structure to provide differential melting curves rather than different chemical composition.
I don't think that qualifies for a whole new state of matter, since the matter is unequivocally solid until you depressurize it, after which some of the matter remains solid and some of the matter melts.
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