Ultrafast laser pulses produce a previously unseen phase of matter

I don't think anyone can predict the applications because creating new materials could have many, or almost no, novel or useful properties. Look at how many different ways we can manipulate iron and create different properties, now there might be even more. Or maybe it isn't stable in bulk atmospheric amounts, but can be held under pressure and has some unique property to make it suitable for computing, or detecting certain kinds of energy or radiation, or forms piezoelectric properties or who knows. Maybe it can be used in optical data processing or amplifying.

Most likely this isn't going to revolutionize our world, but there is always that small chance, and we will certainly find some use for these novel states of matter somewhere, if not just more physics experiments.

Listed authors of reports are a bit like credits in film, and similarly, in fields/production where you have a lot of special-effects/complicated scientific apparatuses/huge custom built computer clusters for doing the analysis, you get a lot of supporting personell that you might want to credit.

Oarticle physics papers sometimes list a huge number of authors, record I think is 5154 for a paper from an LHC collaboration titled "Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at √s=7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments"

Nature wrote about it https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-m...

Excerpt:

"In this material, a wavelike pattern of electrons in high- and low-density regions forms spontaneously but is confined to a single direction within the material. But when hit with an ultrafast burst of laser light—less than a picosecond long, or under one trillionth of a second—that pattern, called a charge density wave or CDW, is obliterated, and a new CDW, at right angles to the original, pops into existence.

This new, perpendicular CDW is something that has never been observed before in this material. It exists for only a flash, disappearing within a few more picoseconds. As it disappears, the original one comes back into view, suggesting that its presence had been somehow suppressed by the new one."

My thoughts:

The first thought that comes to mind is "superposition"... The second thought that comes to mind is "possible higher-dimensional and/or phase-shifted view of the substructure of matter" (in this case, lanthanum tritelluride)... Even if neither of these things turn out to be the case, the phenomena is fascinating!