Physicists Spot Quantum Tornadoes Twirling in a ‘Supersolid’
An editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation.
In a lab nestled between the jagged peaks of the Austrian Alps, rare earth metals vaporize and spew out of an oven at the speed of a fighter jet. Then a medley of lasers and magnetic pulses slow the gas nearly to a halt, making it colder than the depths of space. The roughly 50,000 atoms in the gas lose any sense of identity, merging into a single state. Finally, with a twist of the ambient magnetic field, tiny tornadoes swirl into existence, pirouetting in the darkness.
For three years, the physicist Francesca Ferlaino and her team at the University of Innsbruck worked to image these quantum-scale vortices in action. “Many people told me this would be impossible,” Ferlaino said during a tour of her lab this summer. “But I was so convinced that we would manage.”
Now, in a paper published today in Nature, they’ve published snapshots of the vortices, confirming the long-sought hallmark of an exotic phase of matter known as a supersolid.
