Under extreme conditions, matter takes on properties that lead to remarkable, novel possibilities. Topological superconductors included.
How many states of matter are there? When you were young, you probably learned about the three that are most common to our experience: solid, liquid, and gas. All of these occur with regularity here on Earth’s surface: rocks and ices are solids, water and many oils are liquids, while the atmosphere that we breathe is a gas. However, these three common states of matter are all based on neutral atoms; restrictions that the Universe is not bound by.
If you bombard any atom with enough energy, you’ll kick the electrons off of it, creating an ionized plasma: the fourth state of matter. Turn up the energy high enough, and even protons and neutrons will disintegrate, forming a quark-gluon plasma: arguably the fifth state of matter.
Can there be other, additional states of matter?
There sure can, but unlike what Microsoft’s Satya Nadella recently claimed, “topoconductors,” or topological superconductors, aren’t their own novel state of matter. Instead, there are only two additional states of matter that are thought to exist: Bose-Einstein…
