Scrambled supersolids: Soft form of a solid discovered

Science Daily  January 4, 2021
An international team of researchers (Austria, Switzerland) created supersolids using ultracold quantum gases of highly magnetic lanthanide atoms. This state of matter is solid and liquid at the same time. Due to quantum effects, a very cold gas of atoms can spontaneously develop both a crystalline order of a solid crystal and particle flow like a superfluid quantum liquid. A dipolar supersolid can be imagined as a chain of quantum droplets which communicate with each other via a superfluid background bath. They found that if the superfluid bath between the droplets is drained by control of the external magnetic field the droplets quickly lose knowledge about each other, they dephase, and start to behave like small independent quantum systems, that is the supersolid turns into a normal solid. Their experiment and simulation indicate that the interaction quench causes substantial collective mode excitations that connect to phonons in solids and affect the phase dynamics…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE 

Phase diagram, experimental sequence and starting condition. Credit: Nature Physics (2021)

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