Five new states of matter, maybe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter lists the currently known states of matter. I had an idea for five new ones, well, 2 anyway with 3 variants. They might not be possible but hey, faint heart ne’er won fair maid, and this is only a blog not a paper from CERN. But coincidentally, it is CERN most likely to be able to make them.

A helium atom normally has 2 electrons, in a single shell. In a particle model, they go round and round. However… the five new states:

A: I suspect this one is may already known but isn’t possible and is therefore just another daft idea. It’s just a planar superatom. Suppose, instead of going round and round the same atom, the nuclei were arranged in groups of three in a nice triangle, and 6 electrons go round and round the triplet. They might not be terribly happy doing that unless at high pressure with some helpful EM fields adjusting the energy levels required, but with a little encouragement, who knows, it might last long enough to be classified as matter.

B: An alternative that might be more stable is a quad of nuclei in a tetrahedron, with 8 electrons. This is obviously a variant of A so probably doesn’t really qualify as a separate one. But let’s call it a 3D superatom for now, unless it already has a proper name.

C: Suppose helium nuclei are neatly arranged in a row at a precise distance apart, and two orthogonal electron beams are fired past them at a certain distance on either side, with the electrons spaced and phased very nicely, so that for a short period at least, each of the nuclei has two electrons and the beam energy and nuclei spacing ensures that they don’t remain captive on one nucleus but are handed on to the next. You can do the difficult sums. To save you a few seconds, since the beams need to be orthogonal, you’ll need multiple beams in the direction orthogonal to the row,

D: Another cheat, a variant of C, C1: or you could make a few rows for a planar version with a grid of beams. Might be tricky to make the beams stay together for any distance so you could only make a small flake of such matter, but I can’t see an obvious reason why it would be impossible. Just tricky.

E: A second variant of C really, C2, with a small 3D speck of such nuclei and a grid of beams. Again, it works in my head.

Well, 5 new states of matter for you to play with. But here’s a free bonus idea:

The states don’t have to actually exist to be useful. Even with just the descriptions above, you could do the maths for these. They might not be physically achievable but that doesn’t stop them existing in a virtual world with a hypothetical future civilization making them. And given that they have that specific mathematics, and ergo a whole range of theoretical chemistry, and therefore hyperelectronics, they could therefore be used as simulated constructs in a Turing machine or actual constructs in quantum computers to achieve particular circuitry with particular virtues. You could certainly emulate it on a Yonck processor (see my blog on that). So you get a whole field of future computing and AI thrown in.

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