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Probing Question: What is a supersolid? "Imagine you have an orchestra together, but everyone is playing their own tune, until they begin to follow a conductor. In a normal solid, every atom has its own behavior until very close to absolute zero. Then quantum mechanics takes over and dictates everyone to play the same tune."That's physics professor Moses Chan's musical metaphor for his discovery that atoms in a solid can condense into what he likes to call "one giant atom," a new phase of matter called a supersolid. Together with post-doctoral associate Eun-Seong Kim, Chan found that when a particular type of helium gas has frozen into a crystal at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, it exhibits a property only seen before in superfluids: no friction.
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