Berkeley and Kashiwa, June 8, 2012 - Matter exhibits weird properties at very cold temperatures. Take superfluids, for example: discovered in 1937, they can flow without resistance forever, spookily climbing the walls of a container and dripping onto the floor
In the past 100 years, 11 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to nearly two dozen people for the discovery or theoretical explanation of such cold materials – superconductors, supersolids, and Bose–Einstein condensates, to name two – yet a unifying theory of these extreme behaviors has eluded theorists.
Prof. Hitoshi Murayama and graduate student Haruki Watanabe have now discovered a commonality among these materials that can be used to predict or even design new materials that will exhibit such unusual behavior. The theory applies equally to magnets, crystals, neutron stars and cosmic strings.
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Publication
Publish: Physical Review Letters, June 21, 2012 (Editor's Suggestion, Selected for a Synopsis in Physics)
Title: "Unified description of Nambu–Goldstone bosons without Lorentz invariance"
Authors:
Haruki Watanabe, Graduate student at the Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley
Hitoshi Murayama, MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley and director and professor of the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) at the University of Tokyo