[paul cotter (OP)]

A tresino is a hypothetical conglomerate of a proton and two electrons that is smaller than an atom but larger than a proton. I don't have the knowledge to query this idea analytically but to my uneducated brain it sounds like a wooly concept(Neilep would like this). Any thoughts?

[Halc]

A tresino is apparently quite stable, and its discovery (a 5th phase of matter, one beyond the 4th:plasma) seems to have implications on all sorts of things unexplained until now, including why the corona of a star gets so much (100's of times) hotter that the surface of the star, and why planets take so long to cool down.

I don't see how a particle can be a phase of matter at all, but apparently this 5th phase involves some proportion of tresinos, like plasma involves nuclei stripped of their electrons, thus destroying their identity as 'atoms'.

It is theorized that tresinos were a common state of matter early in the universe, but no 'very' early since it took many epochs for things like protons to form in the first place.

Apparently cold fusion, not understood well at first, may finally be explained by properties of the tresino. It isn't fusion, but it may still well be a viable energy source. Much to learn first.

[varsigma]

I don't see how a particle can be a phase of matter at all,

In some modern experiments, electrons can "de-phase" into separate quasiparticles with charge, with magnetic potential, and with mass. It involves fairly complex geometries in the 2d substrate, these are the fixed waveguides, I would say.
Moreover, when electrons propagate in matter, they are quasiparticles, not free electrons. There is some change in an abstract phase, in a Hilbert space of course.

[paul cotter (OP)]

I remain inherently sceptical, possibly out of ignorance, as I am no physicist. A simple experiment could nail this: fill a discharge tube with hydrogen and apply power- if the tresino is stable the gas after the experiment should show a deficit of hydrogen and a non-hydrogen component.

[Eternal Student]

Hi.

I don't see how a particle can be a phase of matter at all,....

    I honestly don't really understand how the 3 ordinary phases of matter (solid, liquid and gas) actually work.  I usually convince myself that I have some partial understanding of what is happening.   I hope no-one will mind if I dumb this discussion down a bit and discuss something that is at about school level but still worries me.

    At first they (people teaching at school level) make a big point out of explaining that the phase shifts are quite discrete or abrupt.  Specifically, this is not a continuous or smooth change.   The molecules don't become 99% like the solid model, then 98% solid, then..... finally 0% solid and all liquid.   One moment it's solid, raise the temperature a bit and then it's a liquid.    The discrete or sudden switch is most evident in that there is an amount of latent heat required,  for water at room pressure this is at 0 deg. C.    This is clearly some extra heat required above and beyond the usual specific heat capacity and it is only required at a change of temperature from just below 0 to just above 0.

     Then a bit later (probably still at school), they throw some mud in the water.   It seems that these phase shifts can be very localised sometimes.  So that rather than the whole thing being solid or liquid, there can be bits of it that are liquid and bits that are solid.   This can help to explain why butter is the way it is.... a firm thing at 10 deg C, a soft thing at about 20 deg C and a puddle of liquid at 25 deg C.    This change in firmness does seem to change in a very smooth and continuous way.    Butter is the most obvious example but water will also exhibit this propery:   It's not always solid ice or liquid water, sometimes it's slush, a mix of localised bits of solid and liquid.   
    Let's say that butter undergoes a phase shift at precisely 20 deg. C.  So we ought to be able to stick a thermomoneter into some soft butter and find that it will read as >20 (say 21) degrees here and then <20 (say 19) degrees close by when you put the thermometer in somewhere else.    As we raise the room temperature to 22 deg C,   we should find that the butter will still has some regions that read as 19 deg C but now there are less of these and many more regions where the butter has a higher temperature.   We don't seem to get that.... the thermometer will report 22 deg C throughout the butter.    You could argue that the bulb of the thermometer is just too big and is making contact with mutiple regions that are at 19 deg C and >20 deg C,  so reporting only an average that becomes 22 deg C.   However, we know that temperature is only sensibly considered as a measure of the average energy of some large number of molecules.   You can't have a thermometer with a bulb so small that it measures the energy of just one molecule, that would be just the energy of that one molecule and NOT the temperature of the whole object.   We know that in a substance at 20 deg C, there are going to be some really fast molecules and some really slow ones, it's only the average speed that would correspond to 20 deg C.
   So, we're a bit stuck...  we can say "there are localised regions in the solid and liquid phase" but we have no way of sensibly defining a temperature if we did get down to a localised region that was only a few molecules.

    The basic question is.... how localised can the phases be?   If each pair of molecules can individually be connected in either the solid or liquid manner then, on a macroscopic scale, the process of changing phase can still look very much like a smooth and continuous change rather than a sudden or abrupt change.   This is what could be happening in butter, for example.

    Later on (maybe at University) you may start to reconcile the situation in various ways.    Maybe there just aren't any such things as molecles in the form of solid little bits of matter anyway and they don't interconnect in some clear  and rigid manner.   Instead there is some discreteness in some quantum mechanical model of what is happening and this carries over and manifests itself as a sudden or discrete shift in what we can identify as a phase on a macroscopic scale most of the time.

   Anyway, I don't know.   There seems to be different notions of what a discrete phase of matter really is, how localised this could be and different situations in which we may use those notions.

Best Wishes.

[paul cotter (OP)]

I am not quite sure what you are asking here, ES. I would hazard a guess that metastable states are at play in some solid -liquid transitions. Have you ever seen the trick where a bottle of water carefully chilled to just about 0degrees c is shaken and a large proportion of the contents freezes? Supersaturated solutions of various salts will remain liquid until a suitable crystal is introduced leading to a rapid change from liquid to solid phase. 

[Eternal Student]

Hi.

...Supersaturated solutions of various salts will remain liquid until a suitable crystal is introduced leading to a rapid change from liquid to solid phase.... (etc.)....

    Yes, I've seen it.    Another complication to the school level explanation for changes of phase.

    More generally, temperature may not be as useful or fundamental as we may like to think that it is.   This is crossing over into various other threads on the forum.    Knowing the temperature (and presure) is not always enough to know if a substance will be solid or liquid.

   Using your water bottle at about 0 deg C as an example,  if it had first been taken to -20 deg C then even the smallest imperfection would have been enough to start crystalisation and it would have remained solid once the temperature is taken up to 0 deg C.  The final state of the water at (or just below 0 deg C) seems to depend on the path taken rather than just the temperature it ends with.

   Anyway... about Tresinos....  No I hadn't heard much about them, sorry.

Best Wishes.

[paul cotter (OP)]

Indeed, hysteresis is a phenomenon in many physical transformations.