“A team of physicists in Barcelona has created liquid droplets 100 million times thinner than water that hold themselves together using strange quantum laws.
these bizarre droplets emerged in the strange, microscopic world of a laser lattice â an optical structure used to manipulate quantum objects â in a lab at the Spanish Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, or Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO).
The researchers cooled a gas of potassium atoms cooled to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), close to absolute zero.
That’s a state of matter where cold atoms clump together and start to physically overlap. These condensates are interesting because their interactions are dominated by quantum laws, rather than the classical interactions which can explain the behaviour of most large bulks of matter.
When researchers pushed two of these condensates together, they formed droplets, binding together to fill a defined volume. But unlike most liquids, which hold their droplet shapes together through the electromagnetic interactions between molecules, these droplets held their shapes through a process known as “quantum fluctuation.”