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from the what-happens-when-you-freeze-or-boil-it? dept.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/10/after-century-searching-scientists-find-new-liquid-phase
Researchers at CU Boulder’s Soft Materials Research Center (SMRC) have discovered an elusive phase of matter, first proposed more than 100 years ago and sought after ever since.
The team describes the discovery of what scientists call a “ferroelectric nematic” phase of liquid crystal in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The discovery "opens a door to a new universe of materials," said co-author Matt Glaser, a professor in the Department of Physics.
[...] The researchers ran more tests and discovered that this phase of RM734 was 100 to 1,000 times more responsive to electric fields than the usual nematic liquid crystals. This suggested that the molecules that make up the liquid crystal demonstrated strong polar order.
“When the molecules are all pointing to the left, and they all see a field that says, ‘go right,’ the response is dramatic,” Clark said.
[...] When the researchers examined how well aligned the molecules were inside a single domain, “we were stunned by the result,” MacLennan said. The molecules were nearly all pointing in the same direction.
Journal Reference:
Xi Chen, Eva Korblova, Dengpan Dong, et al. First-principles experimental demonstration of ferroelectricity in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal: Polar domains and striking electro-optics [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2002290117)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @06:21PM (3 children)
When it's cold:
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-liquids.html [phys.org]
Also when it's warm:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-have-discovered-new-state-matter-water-180961546/ [smithsonianmag.com]
http://www.inderscience.com/offer.php?id=79670 [inderscience.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday June 14 2020, @11:38PM (2 children)
That's what's missing from the writeup, any indication of the environmental conditions beyond "at higher temperatures" and "at lower temperatures". Usually these exotic properties require something like ten gigatons per square inch of pressure and cooling to 0.000000001 above absolute zero or something similar to appear. Can the result reported be reproduced at STP?
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday June 15 2020, @12:18AM (1 child)
Its in the linked paper from the news article I believe. Quick glance they had temperatures slightly north of 1000 Celsius and started observing the behaviors as it is cooled down to 130-120 Celsius. So, no, doesn't seem like it requires extreme conditions, relatively speaking, for the experiment.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday June 15 2020, @12:24AM
Ah, thanks for the info. So it's not that extreme, but if you need to run it at 120-130 deg.C then it's not going to appear in consumer-grade anything unless they can find another material that has the properties at much lower temperatures.