The 4th And 5th State Of Matter

The fourth state of matter

The fourth state of matter is plasma. Plasma is an ionized gas, a gas into which sufficient energy is provided to free electrons from atoms or molecules and to allow both species, ions and electrons, to coexist. In effect a plasma is a cloud of protons, neutrons and electrons where all the electrons have come loose from their respective molecules and atoms, giving the plasma the ability to act as a whole rather than as a bunch of atoms. Plasmas are the most common state of matter in the universe comprising more than 99% of our visible universe and most of that not visible. Plasma occurs naturally and makes up the stuff of our sun, the core of stars and occurs in quasars, x-ray beam emitting pulsars, and supernovas. On earth, plasma is naturally occurring in flames, lightning and the auroras. Most space plasmas have a very low density, for example the Solar Wind which averages only 10 particles per cubic-cm. Inter-particle collisions are unlikely - hence these plasmas are termed collisionless.

The Fifth State Of Matter -- Bose Einstein

The collapse of the atoms into a single quantum state is known as Bose condensation or Bose-Einstein condensation is now considered a 5th state of matter.

Recently, scientists have discovered the Bose-Einstein condensate, which can be thought of as the opposite of a plasma. It occurs at ultra-low temperature, close to the point that the atoms are not moving at all. A Bose-Einstein condensate is a gaseous superfluid phase formed by atoms cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero. The first such condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvins (nK). --Under such conditions, a large fraction of the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state, producing a superfluid. This phenomenon was predicted in the 1920s by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, based on Bose's work on the statistical mechanics of photons, which was then formalized and generalized by Einstein.