Much of universe may be made up of 'Turkish Taffy'

Alberta Physicists Report Major Breakthrough in Understanding New State of Matter:

The Supersolid

Helium, like all other matter, exists in one of several states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, depending on the circumstances and the element . Physicists at the University of Alberta however, have confirmed a fifth state of matter.

It is only a matter of time before this state of matter finds its way into speculative/science fiction. Or has it already?

What one might usefully call the Turkish Taffy State, for Super Solids are solids with fluid properties. Matter that flows yet may be torn, sheared, snapped.

Silliness aside, we can thank Quantum fluids and solids researcher, Prof. John Beamish, chair of the UA's Department of Physics, and PhD student James Day, for reporting their findings in a paper published in the science journal Nature on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2007.

They cooled helium to a solid state and then manipulated the material by shearing it elastically. In doing so, they found that the solid unexpectedly became much stiffer at the lowest temperatures.

Like...turkish taffy?

Their work follows on the heels of a 2004 discovery by Penn State University team led by Dr. Moses Chan, which electrified the physics world when it announced that it discovered that when they cooled solid helium to an extremely low temperature, and oscillated the material at different speeds, the particles behaved in a way not seen before, suggesting the “perpetual flow” seen in superfluids like liquid helium.

Leave a bar of taffy on your dashboard in the summer, however, and that perpetual flow kicks right in.

What Professor Beamish and his student James Day found was that the shear modulus of solid helium increases by 20% when it is cooled below 0.25K. Shear modulus is the quantification of a solid material's response to "shearing strains", i.e. being cut or torn; as contrasted with "bulk modulus": a solid material's response to uniform pressure.

Chan of Penn State praised their efforts as significantly adding to the body of knowledge about the fundamental states of matter allowed by nature. “This is an important breakthrough since the original discovery,” he said.

What may come as science fiction writers adopt this state of matter into their stories?

Someday sci-fi historians may someday point to Douglas Adams' "intelligent paint' in Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy' as an early harbinger of this new found state of matter.

Image from film Raggedy Anne and Andy 1977