Scientists create a supersolid of light and matter at room temperature
A quantum state that flows like a liquid and orders itself like a crystal, with no need for extreme cold.
It flows without friction like a superfluid and, at the same time, arranges itself like a crystal. Until now, that exotic state only existed near absolute zero.
Researchers from the University of Warsaw, Poland's Military University of Technology, IBM Research Zurich and France's CNRS observed a supersolid at room temperature. The result was published in Science Advances.
The supersolid was predicted in the 1960s and not seen in an experiment until 2017, with ultracold atoms. This team took another route: exciton polaritons, hybrid quasiparticles of light and matter that live just a few picoseconds inside an optical microcavity. The cavity was filled with a custom-designed liquid crystal and coated with an organic semiconductor, which allows that coupling without cooling.
The signal of the phase change was regular bright fringes in the emitted light. With each laser pulse they appeared in a different place: the system chose on its own among equivalent configurations, a textbook example of spontaneous symmetry breaking. The experiment was a race against the clock, because the semiconductor reacted with the liquid crystal and each sample lasted only a few hours.
Studying exotic quantum phases would no longer require costly cryogenic systems, and the system can be tuned with an external voltage.
Key facts
- The liquid-crystal microcavities work even near 60 °C.
- The first supersolid was observed in 2017 with ultracold atoms.
- Two kinds of order were seen at once: in the intensity and in the polarization of the light.
- Published in Science Advances.
The team sees applications in ultrafast photonic devices, neuromorphic computing and highly sensitive optical sensors.
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