Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter • Hacker News Board

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#21

Post by eru » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

hawkice wrote: post #19

jermaustin1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think physics will ever be fully matured. There is always a "Why?" that needs an answer.

I'm not sure that "Why?" is always going to be a physics question, but certainly even after we understand the smallest building blocks, we will need specific models of arbitrarily complex systems where the basic rules are computationally infeasible or resistant to simple analysis. Of course, understanding the true and most basic workings of nature will also take a lot of work, just not a literally infinite supply.

Thanks to chaos, we will probably have no shortage of computationally infeasible systems.

Though the study of those systems is often labelled by something other than 'physics'. Biology or Chemistry or Psychology or Economics etc.

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#22

Post by pas » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #16

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #7

New phases of matter uncovered by ultrafast laser pumping is more common than you might think. Dumping a bunch of energy into a system in less than 30fs (30 x 10^-15s) creates a profoundly non-equilibrium situation. Whatever phase of matter you observe right after will likely have no equilibrium analogue. > The perpendicular version of the CDW that appears after the burst of laser light has never before been observed…

It's upsetting. Reminds me of when the CERN people made that paper about modulated plasma wave acceleration, and pretended they were the first to do it, or at least the popular press did. You only realize it when it's your field (as do I here) but we in physics ought to talk to each other more.

Anyone following science (or tech, or medicine, or anything) news will (ought to) realize how over-hyped and fluff-heavy every press release is. Real breakthroughs are very few and far between, because progress seems incremental. And because usually those breakthroughs are unseen, uninteresting, not even press-release worthy, because we haven't realized its potential. Then someone tries out that new thing for that old problem, and gets maybe decent numbers, usually just meh. Then slowly it builds, and then eventually comes the paradigm shift. But at that point it's the waiting game, slow march of better and better engineering, getting better trade offs, and so on.

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#23

Post by haversine02 » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

throw1234651234 wrote: post #14

cxcorp wrote: post #6

> The idea that two possible states of matter might be in competition and that the dominant mode is suppressing one or more alternative modes is fairly common in quantum materials, the researchers say. This suggests that there may be latent states lurking unseen in many kinds of matter that could be unveiled if a way can be found to suppress the dominant state. How exciting! I can only daydream about the kind of disc…

I don't understand it enough to get excited - what are the potential applications?

In some materials, this hidden configuration might have interesting properties. It could even be (quasi)stable once the original pattern is suppressed. So, novel superconductors or metamaterials, maybe?

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#24

Post by dmix » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

Intermernet wrote: post #3

gjm11 wrote: post #2

Original MIT press release of which this is a word-for-word copy: https://news.mit.edu/2019/light-orders-exotic-material-1111 Actual letter in Nature Physics : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0705-3

Sci-Hub link to pdf http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019...

I'm not from academia but is it unusual to have 21 authors on a paper?

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#25

Post by anon73044 » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

throw1234651234 wrote: post #14

cxcorp wrote: post #6

> The idea that two possible states of matter might be in competition and that the dominant mode is suppressing one or more alternative modes is fairly common in quantum materials, the researchers say. This suggests that there may be latent states lurking unseen in many kinds of matter that could be unveiled if a way can be found to suppress the dominant state. How exciting! I can only daydream about the kind of disc…

I don't understand it enough to get excited - what are the potential applications?

My guess would be maybe in this new state, some metals might be more likely to alloy with others, so we'll have lots of fun new materials with strange properties. Maybe even find a new super conductor or two.

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#26

Post by xaedes » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #24

Intermernet wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sci-Hub link to pdf http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019...

I'm not from academia but is it unusual to have 21 authors on a paper?

My observations: I rarely see it in computer science related papers. I often see it in biology / medicine papers (but I don't see lots of those papers)

If you wonder what 21 people do for one paper, they have mentioned it in the paper pdf (look for the scihub link here in the comments) on the last page: Only two people actually wrote the paper with input from a lot of others, supervised by yet another one.

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#27

Post by motajaxxer » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

xaedes wrote: post #26

dmix wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from academia but is it unusual to have 21 authors on a paper?

My observations: I rarely see it in computer science related papers. I often see it in biology / medicine papers (but I don't see lots of those papers) If you wonder what 21 people do for one paper, they have mentioned it in the paper pdf (look for the scihub link here in the comments) on the last page: Only two people actually wrote the paper with input from a lot of others, supervised by yet another one.

Lab experiments involve huge amount of support people who have to do really specific work for each experiment.

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#28

Post by cwkoss » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #5

Just when you think Physics has little left to discover, something you never expected creates a whole new avenue to explore. "When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science" - Max Planck

What makes you think physics has little left to discover?

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#29

Post by jblakey » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy.

Re: Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

#30

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #16

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #7

New phases of matter uncovered by ultrafast laser pumping is more common than you might think. Dumping a bunch of energy into a system in less than 30fs (30 x 10^-15s) creates a profoundly non-equilibrium situation. Whatever phase of matter you observe right after will likely have no equilibrium analogue. > The perpendicular version of the CDW that appears after the burst of laser light has never before been observed…

It's upsetting. Reminds me of when the CERN people made that paper about modulated plasma wave acceleration, and pretended they were the first to do it, or at least the popular press did. You only realize it when it's your field (as do I here) but we in physics ought to talk to each other more.

An example I'd encountered was a set of papers out of the US Naval Research Lab on fuel synthesis (electricity + seawater => hydrocarbon jet fuel). The citations dated only to the mid/late 1990s, though it turns out prior art and development date to at least the 1960s (for electically-based fuel synthesis), the 1930s if Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from coal is included.