The fermionic condensate
Scientists have created a new form of matter, which they say could lead to new ways of transmitting electricity.
The fermionic condensate is a cloud of cold potassium atoms forced into a state where they behave strangely.
The new matter is the sixth known form of matter after solids, liquids, gases, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995.
"What we've done is create this new exotic form of matter," says Deborah Jin of the University of Colorado.

Strange brew

To make the condensate the researchers cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero - the temperature at which matter stops moving.
They confined the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing up and forming the fermionic condensate.
Jin pointed out that her team worked with a super cooled gas, which provides little opportunity for everyday application. But the way the potassium atoms acted suggested there should be a way to turn it into a room-temperature solid.
It could be a step closer to an everyday, usable superconductor - a material that conducts electricity without losing any of its energy.
"If you had a superconductor you could transmit electricity with no losses," Jin said.
"Right now something like 10% of all electricity we produce in the United States is lost. It heats up wires. It doesn't do anybody any good."
Superconductor technology is being fed into the development of magnetically levitated trains. Free of friction these vehicles glide along at high speeds using a fraction of the energy of conventional trains.

Quark–gluon plasma
A quark–gluon plasma (QGP) or quark soup is a phase of quantum chromo dynamics (QCD) which exists at extremely high temperature and/or density. This phase consists of (almost) free quarks and gluons, which are several of the basic building blocks of matter. Experiments at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) first tried to create the QGP in the 1980s and 1990s: the results led CERN to announce indirect evidence for a "new state of matter" in 2000. Current experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are continuing this effort.
Although the results have yet to be independently verified as of February 2010, scientists at Brookhaven RHIC have tentatively claimed to have created a quark-gluon plasma with an approximate temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius.
Three new experiments running on CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), ALICE, ATLAS and CMS, will continue studying properties of QGP. Starting in November 2010, CERN temporarily ceased colliding protons, and began colliding lead Ions for the ALICE experiment. They were looking to create a QGP. They were expected to stop December 6, and return to colliding protons in January. Within the first week of colliding these lead ions, the LHC appears to have created multiple quark-gluon plasmas with temperatures in the tens of trillions of degrees.
Quark–gluon plasma is a state of matter in which the elementary particles that make up the hadrons of baryonic matter are freed of their strong attraction for one another under extremely high energy densities. These particles are the quarks and gluons that compose baryonic matter. In normal matter quarks are confined; in the QGP quarks are deconfined. In classical QCD quarks are the Fermionic components of mesons and baryons while the gluons are considered the Bosonic components of such particles. The gluons are the force carriers, or bosons, of the QCD color force, while the quarks by themselves are their Fermionic matter counterparts.
Although the experimental high temperatures and densities predicted as producing a quark-gluon plasma have been realized in the laboratory, the resulting matter does not behave as a quasi-ideal state of free quarks and gluons, but, rather, as an almost perfect dense fluid. Actually, the fact that the quark-gluon plasma will not yet be "free" at temperatures realized at present accelerators was predicted in 1984 as a consequence of the remnant effects of confinement.