According to the news, the researchers at the Washington State university are claiming to have creted a negative mass fluid. Yes you heard it right ! that's a negative mass fluid.
Now you may be jumbled up about this weird stuff and might think its impossible. But no ! that possible and that is why these scientists have been able to create this fluid. Accordingly, this fluid respond to ordinary actions but in a much frightening way. Lets see how, we know that any object pushed moves forward but this negative mass fluid, on applying forward force, moves backwards or accelerates backwards.
Well apart from this regular Newtonian world , there exists an unseen and unbound world of weirdness, the quantum world which contains all possibilities of discovering such weird and exciting stuff like the negative mass fluid.
Now the most common questions that arises at this stage is.
HOW DID THEY CREATED IT ?
Well as we all can understand it clearly that its almost impossible to create such stuff in ordinary laboratory conditions. So the researchers required a specialised environment to make this possible.
The researchers at WSU created the conditions for negative mass by cooling rubidium atoms to just a little above absolute zero, creating a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, as predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, particles move extremely slowly and, following the principles of quantum mechanics thus behaving like waves. They also synchronize and move in unison as what is known as a superfluid, which flows without losing energy.
At WSU, researchers on the sixth floor of Webster Hall created these conditions by using lasers to slow down the particles, making them cooler, and allowing hot, high energy particles to escape like steam,hereby cooling the material further.
The lasers trapped the atoms as if they were in a bowl measuring less than a hundred microns across. At this point, the rubidium superfluid has regular mass. Breaking the bowl will allow the rubidium to rush out, expanding as the rubidium in the center pushes outward.
To create negative mass, the reseiarchers applied a second set of lasers that kicked the atoms back and forth and changed the way they spin. Now when the rubidium rushes out fast enough, if behaves as if it has negative mass.
“Once you push, it accelerates backwards,” said Forbes, who acted as a theorist and also analyzed the whole system. “It looks like the rubidium hits an invisible wall.”
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