Putting a new spin on Majorana fermions

The combination of different phases of water—solid ice, liquid water, and water vapor—would require some effort to achieve experimentally. For instance, if you wanted to place ice next to vapor, you would have to continuously ...

A fascinating phase transition from one liquid state to another

A team at the University of Tokyo has described in unprecedented detail the rare phenomenon of liquid-to-liquid phase transitions in a pure substance. By showing how a liquid made of just one type of molecule can switch between ...

Research reveals how order first appears in liquid crystals

Liquid crystals undergo a peculiar type of phase change. At a certain temperature, their cigar-shaped molecules go from a disordered jumble to a more orderly arrangement in which they all point more or less in the same direction. ...

A new way to make biaxial nematic phase liquid crystals

A team of researchers from the University of Colorado in the U.S. and Université Paris-Saclay, in France has developed a new way to make biaxial nematic phase liquid crystals. In their paper published in the journal Science, ...

An ultradilute quantum liquid made from ultra-cold atoms

ICFO researchers created a novel type of liquid 100 million times more dilute than water and 1 million times thinner than air. The experiments, published in Science, exploit a fascinating quantum effect to produce droplets ...

When a porous solid retains its properties in liquid form

Known for their exceptional porosity that enables the trapping or transport of molecules, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) take the form of a powder, which makes them difficult to format. For the first time, an international ...

Melting solid below the freezing point

Phase transitions surround us—for instance, liquid water changes to ice when frozen and to steam when boiled. Now, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered a new phenomenon of so-called metastability ...

Materials made of self-spinning particles

Matter is either gas, liquid or solid based on how its molecules respond to temperature and pressure. But what if the building blocks are self-spinning particles instead of ordinary molecules? Theoretical physicists found ...

Squished cells could shape design of synthetic materials

Life is flexible. All living cells are basically squishy balloons full of water, proteins and DNA, surrounded by oily membranes. Those membranes stand up to significant amounts of stretching and bending, but only recently ...

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