In a lab nestled between the jagged peaks of the Austrian Alps, rare earth metals vaporize and spew out of an oven at the speed of a fighter jet. Then a medley of lasers and magnetic pulses slow the gas nearly to a halt, making it colder than the depths of space. The roughly 50,000 atoms in the gas lose any sense of identity, merging into a single state. Finally, with a twist of the ambient magnetic field, tiny tornadoes swirl into existence, pirouetting in the darkness.
For three years, the physicist Francesca Ferlaino (opens a new tab) and her team at the University of Innsbruck worked to image these quantum-scale vortices in action. “Many people told me this would be impossible,” Ferlaino said during a tour of her lab this summer. “But I was so convinced that we would manage.”
Now, in a paper published today in Nature (opens a new tab), they’ve published snapshots of the vortices, confirming the long-sought hallmark of an exotic phase of matter known as a supersolid.
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