Super-atom!

It's mysterious! It's cool--very cool! It's "Superatom," a newly created phase of matter. "The sample in our lab is the only chunk of [this] stuff in the universe," says physicist Eric Cornell, who helped create the new phase of matter at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Until you read this issue of SW, you probably knew of only three--or maybe four--phases of matter: solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas (high-energy gases found in the Sun and other stars). In all these phases, atoms (the tiny building blocks of matter) bounce around at different speeds, depending on their temperature.

As you cool atoms, says Cornell, they slow down. For instance, when you chill atoms of liquid water, they slow down and freeze to form solid water--ice.

Working steadily for the past six years, the Colorado scientists used that cooling principle to create the Superatom. They supercooled atoms of the element rubidium to the coldest temperature ever--nearly -273 [degrees] C (-460 [degrees] F), also known as absolute zero (see "thermometer," left).

By capturing the action on video--and with the aid of a computer--the scientists could 'see' the atoms slow to a virtual standstill. When that happened, the atoms merged into a cloudy blob--a Superatom, says Cornell.

Atoms in the Superatom state move in a single wavelike pattern, instead of bouncing around independently, as do the atoms in the other phases.

The Colorado team named the new discovery "Bose-Einstein" matter, after physicists Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose, who predicted nearly 70 years ago that the new phase could exist.

No one knows yet if Superatoms will be useful. The Colorado scientists say they've just opened the book on this discovery. Who knows what kinds of mysteries they'll find inside?