Fermionic Condensates

Fermionic Condensates
Researchers have discovered a weird new phase of matter called fermionic condensates. We always learnt in school there are three forms of matter: solids, liquids and gases. But that is not even half truth. There are atleast six: solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, Bose-condensates and a new form of matter called “fermionic condensates” discovered by NASA supported researchers.
Different states of matter have different properties. Solids resist deformation. They are stiff and they can crumble. Liquids flow, they are hard to compress and they assume the shape of their container. Gases are less dense, they are easy to compress and they not only assume the shape of their container, they expand to completely fill it.The fourth form of matter, the plasma, is gas-like, made of atoms that have been ripped apart into ions and electrons. The sun is made of plasma, as is most of the matter in the universe. Plasmas are usually very hot, and you can keep them in magnetic bottles. The fifth form, the Bose-Einstein condensate discovered in 1995, appears when scientists refrigerate particles called bosons to very low tempretures. Cold bosons merge to form a single super-particle that’s more like a wave than an ordinary speck of matter. BECs are fragile and light travels very slowly through them.

Fermionic condensate
A fermionic condensate is a superfluid phase formed by fermionic particles at low tempretures. It is closely related to the Bose-Einstein condensate. Unlike the Bose- Einstein condensates, fermionic condensates are formed using fermions instead of bosons. The first atomic fermionic condensate was created by Deborah S. Jin in 2003. A chiral condensate is an example of a fermionic condensate that appears in theories of massless fermions with chiral symmetry breaking.

Superfluidity
Fermionic condensates are a type of superfluid. As the name suggests, a superfluid possesses fluid properties similar to those  possessed by ordinary liquids and gases, such as the lack of a definite shape and the ability to flow in response to applied forces. However, superfluids possess some properties that do not appear in ordinary matter. For instance, they can flow at low velocities  without dissipating any energy-i.e. zero viscosity.

Creation of the first fermionic condensates
When Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produced a Bose- Einstein condensates from rubidium atoms in 1995, there naturally arose the prospect of creating a similar sort of condensate made from fermionic atoms, which would form a superfluid by the BCS mechanism. In 2003, Deborah Jin, Rudolf Grimm and Wolfgang Kettlerle managed to coax fermionic atoms into forming  molecular bosons, which then underwent Bose-Einstein condensation. But this was not true fermionic condensate.
Later on, Jin managed to produce a condensate out of fermionic atoms for the first time.

Powerful storage batteries
Researchers have discovered a new material that could improve digital storage in the future. At Carnegie Mellon University in  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a team of researchers led by Prof. Prashant Kumta has recently synthesised a new material that can store more energy than the supercapacitors used today. Unlike a battery where energy is stored in a chemical form, a  supercapacitor is an electrical device that stores energy in an electric field. This field is generated by negative and positive plates in the capacitor and their super status comes from their ability to hold four times as much charge as a normal capacitor.