Find the 7th State of Matter for Extra Credit

[joe4224]

hey guys i need a little help here
my introduction to chemistry teacher wants us to find the 7th state of matter for extra credit. I've searched and i can't find it, but if you could provide a little insight or an article that would be wonderful. we know about the bose-einstein and neutron star. but the seventh is still out of grasps.
thanks.

 

[Chi Meson]

I'm sorry, but I think I missed the 6th state!

Fill me in here, we've got: BEC (?) solid, liquid, gas, plasma, ...?

 

[marlon]

maybe the sixth one is gluon-plasma, you know, due to extreme high energy the strong force gets so weak that the atomic nuclei break down in a buch of loose quarks...

marlon

 

[marlon]

After that it would be something with strings involved, i guess. We can nolonger speak about quarks but about some "regions" of energy denoted by the strings...

i am just wondering here, hmmm

marlon

 

[Gonzolo]

I'm sorry, but I think I missed the 6th state!

Fill me in here, we've got: BEC (?) solid, liquid, gas, plasma, ...?

He said neutron star.

4th: plasma
5th: BEC
6th: core of neutron star
7th: QG plasma

 

[jcsd]

Asking for the seventh state of matter 'is' is a bit silly as we don't assign ordinals to different states. But looking at what he's put for the other states I guess what he means is a fermionic condensate.

 

[chroot]

jcsd's right. Tell your chem teacher that no one refers to states by numbers, and just give him the list:

solid
liquid
gas
plasma
bose-einstein condensate
fermionic condensate
quark-gluon plasma

- Warren

 

[chroot]

And I'm not really sure I'd call a neutron star a "phase of matter," but the distinction is ambiguous anyway.

- Warren

 

[Bystander]

http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/sethna/OrderParameters/Intro.html

The introduction: "As a kid in elementary school, I was taught that there were three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. The ancients thought that there were four: earth, water, air, and fire, which was considered sheer superstition. In junior high, I remember reading a book called The Seven States of Matter. At least one was ``plasma'', which made up stars and thus most of the universe, and which sounded rather like fire to me.
The original three, by now, have become multitudes. In important and precise ways, magnets are a distinct form of matter. Metals are different from insulators. Superconductors and superfluids are striking new states of matter. The liquid crystal in your wristwatch is one of a huge family of different liquid crystalline states of matter [1] (nematic, cholesteric, blue phase I, II, and blue fog, smectic A, B, C, C*, D, I, ...). There are over 200 qualitatively different types of crystals, not to mention the quasicrystals (figure 1). There are disordered states of matter like spin glasses, and states like the fractional quantum hall effect with excitations of charge e/3 (like quarks). Particle physicists tell us that the vacuum we live within has in the past been in quite different states: in the last vacuum but one, there were four different kinds of light [2] (mediated by what is now the photon, the W+, the W-, and the Z particle). We'll discuss this more in lecture two. "

You might check your notes, or ask for a restatement from your instructor --- intro chem isn't too likely a course to find concerns for such esoterica as has been already discussed in the other responses.

There is also "Seven Solid States," Walter J. Moore, among other texts from the sixties which highlight for the chemistry student the pitfalls of absolute statements that everything must be a solid, liquid, gas, blah-blah-blah. Are you certain that you were not asked to read and summarize something of this ilk?

 

[olson]

What about the newly discovered Fermionic condensates?

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/12feb_fermi.htm