{"id":242216,"date":"2026-08-05T01:19:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T06:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/quantum-fluid-reveals-hidden-states-that-can-be-switched-with-a-magnetic-field"},"modified":"2026-08-05T01:19:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T06:19:05","slug":"quantum-fluid-reveals-hidden-states-that-can-be-switched-with-a-magnetic-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/quantum-fluid-reveals-hidden-states-that-can-be-switched-with-a-magnetic-field","title":{"rendered":"Quantum fluid reveals hidden states that can be switched with a magnetic field"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are often described as a \u201cfifth state of matter\u201d: a quantum state in which many particles lose their individual identities and behave as one collective object. For more than 60 years, researchers have sought to create such condensates from excitons\u2014electron-hole pairs\u2014as a solid-state route to macroscopic quantum coherence, which is useful for quantum technologies. This has been difficult to realize in controllable semiconductor devices because optically generated excitons have very short lifetimes of around a billionth of a second, and BECs are normally attained with ultracold gases in a vacuum.<\/p>\n

But now, a team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has observed a tunable BEC of excitons at high temperature in an atomically thin semiconductor. The findings, published in Nature<\/i><\/a>, reveal not only that the excitons form a BEC but also that the condensate has an internal structure that can be switched by a magnetic field.<\/p>\n

The work enables a new platform for studying quantum fluids in solid materials. (A quantum fluid is an exotic state of matter in which gases of electrons or other particles behave collectively like a fluid.) It also has implications for future quantum simulations, coherent optoelectronics in next-generation telecommunications and computing, and exciton-based devices enabling faster, more efficient computing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are often described as a \u201cfifth state of matter\u201d: a quantum state in which many particles lose their individual identities and behave as one collective object. For more than 60 years, researchers have sought to create such condensates from excitons\u2014electron-hole pairs\u2014as a solid-state route to macroscopic quantum coherence, which is useful for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242216","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}