Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: ijaz on 04/12/2015 04:55:04
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Is Bose Einstein Condensate the fifth state of matter , the the others being solid liquid gas and plasma??
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A Bose Einstein Condensate has rather different properties from normal matter, in that the BEC behavior is dominated by quantum effects which are washed out by thermal noise in "normal" matter.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate
If you look at the right-hand side of this web page, you will see a listing of 12 categories that may also lay claim to be states of matter.
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I couldn't locate the 12 categories on the RHS of webpage alluded to by you. Please clarify.
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Plasma has a mind of its own, exhibits collective behaviour , supports EM behaviour due to Debye shielding. it behaves sometimes as an ionized gas and sometimes fluid like. So it too is not matter in the normal sense although it constitutes 99% of the universe.
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There are many, many "states of matter"
The common ones for pure phases are solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Supercritical fluids are also an important class, and should be familiar to anyone who has completed college-level general chemistry. But there are also superfluids, Bosonic and Fermionic states (solid, liquid and gas), there is the degenerate matter found in neutron stars, and whatever is in black holes. Let's not forget "quark soup".
Also, there are many classes of "solid." There are crystalline lattices of covalently bonded atoms (like diamond and quartz), amorphous covalent solids (like glass), crystalline ionic solids (salts, like sodium chloride etc.). Then there are metals, in which some of the electrons are completely delocalized throughout the entire solid. There are also molecular solids (small molecules each held together by covalent bonds, but the molecules are held together by much weaker forces (naphthalene, sugar, menthol etc.) Not all substances can adopt all of these forms, but most substances can adopt many of them depending on the conditions imposed. Hydrogen, for example, can exist as a molecular solid (H2 molecules stuck together at really low temperatures and/or high pressures), as an ionic solid (H+ and H–, under extreme pressures), and as a metal (under super-high pressures, as found in Jupiter's core).
There are also many classes of liquids. There are ionic liquids, crystalline liquids, metallic liquids, etc. etc. etc.
Ultimately we have to draw the line somewhere for these different classes to be useful. (I doubt too many people would be able to remember the 39 phases of matter without some nifty song to remind them).
One interesting thing to look into is phase diagrams for specific substances (for instance water has an interesting phase diagram http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_phase_diagram.html)
Then there are mixed-phases (solutions, colloids, sol-gels, etc. etc.)
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The list I saw on the Wikipedia page information box listed the following States of matter:
Solid · Liquid · Gas · Plasma · Bose–Einstein condensate · Bose gas · Fermionic condensate · Fermi gas · Fermi liquid · Supersolid · Superfluidity · Luttinger liquid
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(I don't recall hearing of a Luttinger liquid before...)
The link at the top of this box takes you to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_matter
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WE agree there are four fundamental states of matter---the others are a variant or a departure from the fundamental state.
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WE agree there are four fundamental states of matter---the others are a variant or a departure from the fundamental state.
I will tentatively agree, if your four states of matter are solid, liquid, gas, and supercritical fluid (SCF). I would say that plasma is more of a departure from the fundamental state than SCFs are.