Quarter 2: Current Event 1

 

Helium: Not so super after all

An exciting discovery in physics turns out to be merely a case of mistaken identity"

              In 2004 scientist Moses Chan of Pennsylvania State University made a supernatural discovery. He discovered some sort of super solid that could flow without slowing down. He found a super solid that when cooled down to super cold temperatures could flow without slowing down, or without friction in other words. It appeared to not follow the law of friction which should not be possible. Ever since scientist have been calling such materials super solids. Ever since many scientists have been fighting to make the discovery their own. But now Chan has reported that the discovery is untrue, or in other words too strange to be true. He repeated his experiment and failed in proving his friction-free motion theory. The super solid that he thought was magical was actually a test material that became too stiff.  Chan told Science News he now feels “a sense of disappointment.”

             “Super solids were the latest super stuff to catch the interest of physicists, scientists who study matter and energy. Superconductors are materials that can carry electric currents without disruptions. Super fluids don’t obey the rules we’re used to; they may flow up and over the side of a container. Super solids would have been like super fluids, able to flow without friction.” Is what Chan told Science News in great disappointment. Friction is the force that slows down the motion of two touching things moving past each other. When you rub your hands together quickly, the heat you feel is from friction. Chan worked with one of his co workers Eunseong Kim on the first experiment. They used helium, which we usually use for blowing balloons. Like all matter, helium can exist as a solid, liquid or gas. Chan and Kim didn’t use helium gas; they used a solid form, which exists only at extremely low temperatures. They put the solid helium in a glass cylinder and put that in a device that twisted it one way and then the other, reversing direction 1,000 times per second.

             After that came the exiting part. Once the scientists lowered the temperature the cylinder began twisting faster. This increase in speed suggested some helium atoms had broken free of the solid and were acting more like a liquid, flowing without friction to slow them. That suggested some of the helium had transformed into a super solid. But in his team’s latest study, Chan found an error that he’d missed the first time around: A glitch in the construction of the twisting cylinder. And this mistake threw off the measurements. Although the error was tiny, it was large enough to confuse the researchers. What they had thought was a super solid turned out to be solid helium becoming stiffer.
Chan might not have found a super solid but he might have began a new era to find new things. Explore further and extend out limits. His findings, although mistaken were interesting and proving them impossible must have been the hardest action he has ever took.

http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/2012/11/helium-not-so-super-after-all/