Fifth State of Matter confirmed!

@iammoteh/Quanta Magazine

By Ines Urdaneta, Research Scientist at Resonance Science Foundation

We are familiarized with the four states of matter acknowledged so far: solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Who would have imagined a fifth state of matter, containing simultaneously two states? Within the diversity of crystallization forms or phases of water from liquid to solid ice (more than seventeen crystalline and several amorphous ice structure), appeared a new one: ionic oxygen crystal with ionic hydrogen (mainly protons) moving inside, like a fluid. It has been named ice XVIII, and it is both a new phase of water (because it depends on applied temperature and pressure) and a new state of matter (because it gathers both a solid and a fluid).

Crystals are formed by ionized atoms, such that the electrostatic forces between cations and ions keep the lattice solid. The common salt crystal has anions of Chlorine (Cl-) and cations of Sodium (Na+), is in solid state at room temperature, but the superionic crystal of water synthesized recently requires extremely high pressure and temperature to form, as it first has to ionize its atoms -breaking the water molecules-. In all other crystallization forms of ice water, the molecules remain; the ice forms precisely because of cold temperatures that freeze the system. But in this superionic experiments, high temperature (above 2000 kelvin) brakes the water molecules, and high pressure (above 100 gigapascals) densifies the system.

One wonders what natural scenario could host such an extravagancy. Apparently, a perfect scenario for it can be found in Ice Giants like Uranus and Neptune, which are composed mainly by Ice water (at least 65%). As a matter of fact, superionic ice at extreme pressure and temperature is relevant as an explanation for their core, where such extreme conditions are expected. Their cores must have a particularity, given the exotic magnetic fields emanating from of these Ice Giants, compared to the remaining planets of the solar systems that have a magnetic field pretty much aligned with the axe of rotation and with a simpler shape suggesting a conductive fluid region in the core that swirls, allowing the emanation of massive magnetic fields.

Neptuno and Uranus magnetic fields behave differently, and this could be explained if the conducting fluid responsible for the “dynamo effect” was confined into a thin outer shell of the planet, instead of letting it reach down into the core. The exotic magnetic field behavior could be explained with this new state of matter.

“This suggested superionic ice would conduct electricity, like a metal, with the hydrogens playing the usual role of electrons. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-hot-superionic-ice-may-be-natures-most-common-form-of-water-20190508/

On the other hand, we have been used to understanding conductivity of elementary charged particles such as electrons that compose the electronic current. Who would have guessed a current of protons -which are not considered to be elementary particles because of their additional internal structure-? Though this exotic behavior of water was expected from numerical simulations more than thirty years ago, the fact of observing it for the first time is breathtaking, especially when considering the amount of approximations involved in the model since the complexity of the system prevented exact quantum chemical calculations.

The authors of this work published in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1114-6) resume in their abstract the experience: “Particularly intriguing is the prediction that H2O becomes superionic6–with liquid-like protons diffusing through the solid lattice of oxygen— when subjected to extreme pressures and high temperatures. Numerical simulations suggest that the characteristic diffusion of the protons through the empty sites of the oxygen solid lattice (1) gives rise to a surprisingly high ionic conductivity above 100 Siemens per centimetre, that is, almost as high as typical metallic (electronic) conductivity, (2) greatly increases the ice melting temperature to several thousand kelvin, and (3) favours new ice structures with a close-packed oxygen lattice.“

This discovery, gathering a diversity of topics, addressed simultaneously all scales, from the atomic to the cosmological, connected in a single thread just as the unified theory proposed by Nassim Haramein.

Fractal Pattern in a Quantum Material Confirmed for the First Time!

Image by: Arkadiusz Jadczyk

The word fractal has become increasingly popular, although the concept started more than two centuries ago in the 17th century with prominent and prolific mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. Leibnitz is believed to have addressed for the first time the notion of recursive self-similarity, and it wasn’t until 1960 that the concept was formally stabilized both theoretically and practically, through the mathematical development and computerized visualizations by Benoit Mandelbrot, who settled on the name “fractal”.

Fractals are defined mainly by three characteristics:

1. Self-similarity: identical or very similar shapes and forms at all scales.
2. Iteration: a recursive relationship limited only by computer capacity. With sufficiently high performance, the iterations could be infinite. This allows for very detailed shapes at every scale, that modify with respect to the first iteration, manifesting the original shape at some levels of iteration. Because of this, fractals may have emergent properties, which make them a suitable tool for complex systems.
3. Fractal dimension, or fractional dimensions: describes the counter-intuitive notion that a measured length changes with the length of the measuring stick used; it quantifies how the number of scaled measuring sticks required to measure, for example, a coastline, changes with the scale applied to the stick.

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The fractal dimension of a curve can be explained intuitively thinking of a fractal line as an object too detailed to be one-dimensional, but too simple to be two-dimensional.7

Although fractals now-a-days are commonly used for the macroscopic regime such as the branches of a tree, a broccoli, blood vessels and many others, for the first time physicists at MIT have discovered fractal-like patterns in a quantum material. The material is neodymium nickel oxide or NdNiO3, a rare earth nickelate that conduces electricity or acts as an insulator, depending on its temperature. It also presents inhomogeneous magnetism: domains or regions with a specific magnetic orientation that vary in size and shape throughout the material. The material exhibits this peculiar electronic and magnetic behavior as a result of quantum, atomic-scale effects, and for this reason it is called a quantum material.

The researchers had to design a very special X-ray-focusing lens in order to map the size, shape, and orientation of magnetic domains point by point at different temperatures, confirming that the material formed magnetic domains below a certain critical temperature. Above this temperature, the domains disappeared erasing the magnetic order. Nevertheless, if they cooled the sample back to below the critical temperature, the magnetic domains reappeared almost in the same place as before! This means that the system has memory, which was very unexpected. One could have a system robust against external perturbations, even if subjected to heat, such that the information is not lost.

Secondly, after mapping the material’s magnetic domains and measuring the size of each domain, the researchers counted the number of domains of a given size and plotted their number as a function of size. The resulting distribution showed the same pattern again and again, no matter what range of domain size they focused on. They found that these magnetic patterns have a fractal nature!
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“It was completely unexpected — it was serendipity.”
-Riccardo Comin, assistant professor of physics at MIT.

Because the material acts as an insulator or conductor depending on the temperature, scientists are exploring neodymium nickel oxide for neuromorphic devices — devices that mimic biological neurons. Here, temperature would play the role of voltage in the biological system, which is active or inactive depending on the voltage that it receives. Another potential application is resilient, magnetic data storage devices.