In the world of quantum mechanics, phenomena occur that are quite different from our everyday perceptions. One of these is superfluidity. Superfluidity is a special state that appears in substances ...

In my first year of graduate school, I briefly shared an office with a quiet, older graduate student. When we finally managed some chit-chat, I learned that he was “working on theory of glasses with ...

Jiggling superfluid An artist’s depiction of a superfluid wave propagating through a layered superconductor. (Courtesy: Sampson Wilcox and Emily Theobald) A collective mode of electrons predicted to ...

Superfluids such as liquid helium behave in ways that challenge conventional ideas about liquids, flowing without viscosity while still interacting with dissolved molecules. A newly developed optical ...

Physicists have watched a quantum fluid do something once thought almost impossible: stop moving. In experiments with ultra-thin graphene, researchers observed a superfluid—normally defined by its ...

You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light shining at it: Optical light illuminates a material's surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a ...

Ordinary matter, when cooled, transitions from a gas into a liquid. Cool it further still, and it freezes into a solid. Quantum matter, however, can behave very differently. In the early 20th century, ...

Researchers may have glimpsed a supersolid, an enigmatic quantum version of a classical solid. Bilayer excitons spontaneously self-assemble into a solid phase. Credit: Cory Dean/Columbia University.

Usually, when something gets warmed up, heat tends to spread outward before eventually dissipating. But things are a little different in the world of superfluid quantum gas. For the first time, MIT ...

Imagine a tsunami, a colossal wave capable of traveling across entire oceans and causing immense destruction. Now, picture another special kind of wave, known as a soliton. Unlike a regular wave that ...

A time crystal, a long-life quantum system approaching perpetual motion, has been hooked up to its environment for the first time, unlocking an intriguing way to increase quantum computational and ...