Dumping a bunch of energy into a system in less than 30fs (30 x 10^-15s) creates a profoundly non-equilibrium situation. Whatever phase of matter you observe right after will likely have no equilibrium analogue.
> The perpendicular version of the CDW that appears after the burst of laser light has never before been observed in this material, Gedik says. It "just briefly flashes, and then it's gone," Kogar says, to be replaced by the original CDW pattern which immediately pops back into view.
The interesting bit is here:
> Gedik points out that "this is quite unusual. In most cases, when you add energy to a material, you reduce order."
That is what's great about this. New phases of matter in ultrafast experiments are old news.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy...
The impression generated was tremendously misleading.
I ended up digging into the history myself:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/29ihl7/us_doe_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
Did not know this, until now! (But then again, I am not a professional Physicist, so I claim exemption from having to know!)
Anyway, very interesting!
Actual letter in Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0705-3
"When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science" - Max Planck
Of course, understanding the true and most basic workings of nature will also take a lot of work, just not a literally infinite supply.
How exciting! I can only daydream about the kind of discoveries to be found about matter in, say, 50 years.
Most likely this isn't going to revolutionize our world, but there is always that small chance, and we will certainly find some use for these novel states of matter somewhere, if not just more physics experiments.
A lot of discoveries like these aren't exciting because of commercial potential, if that's what you mean by applications. As we discover more states and more properties of these states, as we develop technologies to persist these states for longer than a fleeting amount of time, we might discover interesting properties which may have commercial uses. Sometimes, the technologies developed to create/contain such exotic materials themselves tend to have commercial applications. That's how it is with the interplay of science and technology with the economy.
"In this material, a wavelike pattern of electrons in high- and low-density regions forms spontaneously but is confined to a single direction within the material. But when hit with an ultrafast burst of laser light—less than a picosecond long, or under one trillionth of a second—that pattern, called a charge density wave or CDW, is obliterated, and a new CDW, at right angles to the original, pops into existence.
This new, perpendicular CDW is something that has never been observed before in this material. It exists for only a flash, disappearing within a few more picoseconds. As it disappears, the original one comes back into view, suggesting that its presence had been somehow suppressed by the new one."
My thoughts:
The first thought that comes to mind is "superposition"... The second thought that comes to mind is "possible higher-dimensional and/or phase-shifted view of the substructure of matter" (in this case, lanthanum tritelluride)... Even if neither of these things turn out to be the case, the phenomena is fascinating!
Wonder if it's related to photosynthesis?
These guys are talking about entirely different states of matter.
Though the study of those systems is often labelled by something other than 'physics'. Biology or Chemistry or Psychology or Economics etc.
Oarticle physics papers sometimes list a huge number of authors, record I think is 5154 for a paper from an LHC collaboration titled "Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at √s=7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments"
Nature wrote about it https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-m...
If you wonder what 21 people do for one paper, they have mentioned it in the paper pdf (look for the scihub link here in the comments) on the last page: Only two people actually wrote the paper with input from a lot of others, supervised by yet another one.