{"id":114924,"date":"2020-10-22T20:27:33","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T03:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/supercrystal-a-hidden-phase-of-matter-created-by-a-burst-of-light"},"modified":"2020-10-22T20:27:33","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T03:27:33","slug":"supercrystal-a-hidden-phase-of-matter-created-by-a-burst-of-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/supercrystal-a-hidden-phase-of-matter-created-by-a-burst-of-light","title":{"rendered":"Supercrystal: A hidden phase of matter created by a burst of light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/supercrystal-a-hidden-phase-of-matter-created-by-a-burst-of-light.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Circa 2019<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>\u201cFrustration\u201d plus a pulse of laser light resulted in a stable \u201csupercrystal\u201d created by a team of researchers led by Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory, together with University of California, Berkeley, and two other national laboratories.<\/p>\n<p>This is one of the first examples of a new state of matter with long-term stability transfigured by the energy from a sub-pico-second laser pulse. The team\u2019s goal, supported by the Department of Energy, is to discover interesting states of matter with unusual properties that do not exist in equilibrium in nature.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are looking for hidden states of matter by taking the matter out of its comfortable state, which we call the ground state,\u201d says the Penn State team leader Venkatraman Gopalan, professor of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/materials\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">materials<\/a> science. \u201cWe do this by exciting the electrons into a higher state using a photon, and then watching as the material falls back to its normal state. The idea is that in the excited state, or in a state it passes through for the blink of an eye on the way to the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/ground+state\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">ground state<\/a>, we will find properties that we would desire to have, such as new forms of polar, magnetic and electronic states.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Circa 2019 \u201cFrustration\u201d plus a pulse of laser light resulted in a stable \u201csupercrystal\u201d created by a team of researchers led by Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory, together with University of California, Berkeley, and two other national laboratories. This is one of the first examples of a new state of matter with long-term stability [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}