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Nine States of Matter? The Lesser Known States of Matter Essay

Decent Essays
Traditionally in school we are taught that there are only four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Fortunately this is not true as that would be boring. There are also at least 4 other-less common states and Icontest a fifth. These are Bose-Einstein condensate, photonic molecules, quark-gluon plasma, superconductors, and superfluids. They all have unique properties that clearly distinguish differences between them and the traditional four states. These breakthroughs could help us in the future and have some practical uses right now.

My personal favorite state of matter is actually Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). This state was first achieved in 1995 (predicted in 1924 by Albert Einstein) by firing photons directly at the
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Mikhael Lukin (the Physicist that led the study) wanted to know what would happen when you fired two protons through the same space so that the first would slow down and the second would just pass through the other. That however did not happen and the two photons emerged together bonded through their poles.

Quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is a substance that existed “For a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang” (Trafton). it was the “soup” that was made up of the things that protons and neutrons are made of. These infinitesimally small particles are quarks and gluons. They exist at temperatures around four trillion degrees. As you can imagine, it is very difficult to study these wonders through a telescope (since they don't even exist at all in nature). so we have to make and study them up close, using particle accelerators. The scientists that make QGP accelerate particles until they are traveling almost the speed of light then crash them head on into one another. the heat that occurs from this collision is enough to melt the protons into quarks and gluons. the resultant substance has almost no friction and is almost a liquid. It used to be that when the public found out about particle accelerators that a lot of them though that they could create a black hole with them

Superconductors are not new, they were discovered in 1911 by Heike Onnes when he had just succeeded at liquefying helium (a few degrees
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