Anyone knows if there are examples of such states, which were discovered in very specific conditions in lab, to be found outside? Does creation/discovery of such states help in explaining any hitherto unexplainable observations?
The precise state of matter studied in this paper I think is unlikely to exist "naturally".
But yes there are states of matter that exist in nature but are just not obvious until you study them carefully in a lab. For example antiferromagnets exist in nature at naturally cold temperatures (see hematite), but unless you’re looking for them, they just look like normal nonmagnetic solids. Thus they were discovered millennia after ferromagnets.
But there are more exotic states that were first discovered in labs and later theorized to exist in nature, but that have not yet been proven. One example of such a theory is that a superconductivity-like state might occur naturally in neuron stars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity
"State of matter" isn't exactly a useful description in this particular case, but it's interesting that enzyme catalysis cannot be explained fully by classical chemistry/physics alone.
It never ceases to amaze me how many different effects exist in the Universe, waiting for us to discover/exploit. I wonder how many features you could comment out and we'd still be able to evolve, v/s how many of these quirks we depend on for even existing?!
> Weyl semimetals are materials that allow electricity to flow in unusual ways with very high speed and zero energy loss because of special relativistic quasi-particles called Weyl fermions. Spin ice, on the other hand, are magnetic materials where the magnetic moments (tiny magnetic fields within the material) are arranged in a way that resembles the positions of hydrogen atoms in ice. When these two materials are combined, they create a heterostructure, composed of atomic layers of dissimilar materials.
I’m not going to pretend to understand how any of this works.
How long do you have to work in physics until you grok things like this? And how much longer until you get to come up with cool names like “spin ice”.
The major problem with understanding articles like this is that while it typically doesn't involve quantum entanglement, it's close enough to quantum that it makes the science writers get all giddy about the words they are throwing around and they do their usual "why inform the reader about what is going on when we can just make them go Gee Whiz" schtick.
The key word is "quasi-particle" which is somewhat less exotic than it sounds. It is a combination of what you might call real or normal particles that produces some sort of pattern in it that itself acts like a particle of some sort. The resulting "quasi-particle" can have all kinds of interesting properties that normal particles can't have on their own, but what makes them "quasi" is that they can't exist on their own. They're intrinsically on top of some substrate of normal particles.
One of the simplest quasiparticle is the "electron hole". Take a lattice of some electrically neutral substance. Remove one electron from it. There is now an "electron hole" in it. You can treat that hole like a particle now. It can "move" to another location by having the real electrons change places. It can "flow" through a series of such events. You can model a lot of things with "electron holes" that act in very particle-like ways. But they don't exist on their own. This one is simple because you don't even need quantum mechanics to get a hold of it in your head.
Many more complicated scenarios are possible. Many interesting things can happen with them. Most, if not all, news articles about "new phases of matter", which science writers love to write about only slightly less than making "woo woo" motions with their fingers while talking about quantum entanglement, are new quasiparticles of some sort. This is somewhat less interesting than they think because if you include quasiparticles as "phases of matter" then there are already hundreds or thousands, but the science writer wants to write an article about every single one of them as if the list is now "solid, liquid, gas, Weyl semimetals" and then write the next article as if the list is now "solid, liquid, gas, ELECTRON HOLE" and so on and so on for each new quasiparticle.
But from this perspective, the list hasn't been so short as "solid, liquid, gas" for well over a hundred years now, and while adding a new one is often good science, it has also been "just" another one of thousands for a while now.
This post is not an explanation of "spin ice", "Wely fermions", or anything else; what this is is the "secret decoder ring" to remove the wiggly fingers and the "woo woo" noises the science writers add to this topic every time they write about it and to give you the terms you can Google and start reading up on what is one of the most interesting and productive fields in the hard sciences right now. Everyone loves to talk about how stuck particle physics is, but physics is making a lot of interesting findings in the field of making the particles we know about sing and dance in all sorts of new and interesting ways.
> One of the simplest quasiparticle is the "electron hole". Take a lattice of some electrically neutral substance. Remove one electron from it. There is now an "electron hole" in it. You can treat that hole like a particle now. It can "move" to another location by having the real electrons change places. It can "flow" through a series of such events. You can model a lot of things with "electron holes" that act in very particle-like ways. But they don't exist on their own. This one is simple because you don't even need quantum mechanics to get a hold of it in your head.
An electron hole seems like a simple, almost silly idea at first. Isn't it just like the hole in a sliding puzzle game. You move a neighbouring electron into the hole, so the hole disappears and a new hole appears at the neighbouring position. It seems to "move". Does this deserve a special name like "quasi-particle"?
But it's not like the hole in a sliding puzzle!
An electron hole moves with inertia, like a real particle. It behaves as if it has mass: You can push it and it starts moving. If you push it more, it accelerates more. But unlike a sliding puzzle, when you stop pushing, the electron hole carries on moving at the same speed.
It keeps going by itself in whatever direction it was going, until it's pushed in a different direction, or bounces off something.
You can't push a sliding puzzle hole at a diagonal angle, let alone push it that way and then watch the puzzle hole keep on moving that way by itself like an independently moving object, as far as it can go until it hits something.
If you had a large sliding puzzle with two holes, you wouldn't expect to be able to send them towards each other, bounce off each other and continue.
And you certainly can't perform double slit interference with sliding puzzle holes. You can, in principle (hard in practice), make electron hole beams and interfere them.
Things like holes and other patterns in matter behave remarkably like real, coherent particles, even though they are just patterns.
Pretty interesting, I recently build an nth order spherical harmonics encoder that can encode the electronic structure of a local environment (of n Å) into a high dimensional fingerprint. We can then use this to search against a big TB dataset of known structures we built to see if we can find analogous configurations. I've started building the structure in the article, I'm interested to see what a search turns up.
Neat! Which spherical harmonics descriptor are you using, and what does your in-house TB dataset cover? What do you plan to do with any matches you find?
If you think this is cool/valuable, I just want to point out that this work is being paid for by the DOE Office of Science (BES division), uses the NSF National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and is using money from an NSF CAREER award (“Acknowledgments” section under “Funding” in the actual paper [1]).
The former is facing a cut of 14% [2] (The Office of Science overall is seeing a similar cut), the second is facing a 40% cut [3], and the latter appears to be destroyed entirely (no money requested) [4] in documents released by these agencies for FY2026 (executive budget).
This research is also supported by Chinese funding agencies, who I imagine will not be engaging such senseless hamstringing of their national scientific organs…
Your link seems unrelated to the topic of this article? I gave the line items for the research conducted in the OP.
A good faith reading of your comment leads me to guess you might take issue with a small number of unrelated NSF CAREER awards going to research you don’t find worthwhile (such as those alluded to in your link). But the vast majority of CAREER awards fund what I would imagine you would consider “real science” [1], like the content of OP.
Considering they provided multiple references to exactly what they were talking about, what gave you issues? They're not talking about what you linked, and they are talking about what they linked.
Anyone knows if there are examples of such states, which were discovered in very specific conditions in lab, to be found outside? Does creation/discovery of such states help in explaining any hitherto unexplainable observations?
The precise state of matter studied in this paper I think is unlikely to exist "naturally".
But yes there are states of matter that exist in nature but are just not obvious until you study them carefully in a lab. For example antiferromagnets exist in nature at naturally cold temperatures (see hematite), but unless you’re looking for them, they just look like normal nonmagnetic solids. Thus they were discovered millennia after ferromagnets.
But there are more exotic states that were first discovered in labs and later theorized to exist in nature, but that have not yet been proven. One example of such a theory is that a superconductivity-like state might occur naturally in neuron stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity
I'll assume you meant "neutron stars."
But "neuron stars" is still an intriguing typo.
Computronium
Always wondered about this.
Even magnets and plasma aren’t blatantly obvious until one sees them in action.
In the early da, someone magnetizing a piece of iron must have seemed like utter witchcraft…
"State of matter" isn't exactly a useful description in this particular case, but it's interesting that enzyme catalysis cannot be explained fully by classical chemistry/physics alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling#Biology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinch_(plasma_physics)
It never ceases to amaze me how many different effects exist in the Universe, waiting for us to discover/exploit. I wonder how many features you could comment out and we'd still be able to evolve, v/s how many of these quirks we depend on for even existing?!
From the article:
> Weyl semimetals are materials that allow electricity to flow in unusual ways with very high speed and zero energy loss because of special relativistic quasi-particles called Weyl fermions. Spin ice, on the other hand, are magnetic materials where the magnetic moments (tiny magnetic fields within the material) are arranged in a way that resembles the positions of hydrogen atoms in ice. When these two materials are combined, they create a heterostructure, composed of atomic layers of dissimilar materials.
I’m not going to pretend to understand how any of this works.
How long do you have to work in physics until you grok things like this? And how much longer until you get to come up with cool names like “spin ice”.
> How long do you have to work in physics until you grok things like this?
By the end of an undergraduate degree, especially if you elect courses in advanced particle physics.
This is solid-state, not particle physics.
Indeed. Fermions are usually taught in particle physics, especially when distinguishing Weyl/Majorana/Dirac fermions.
So your claim is spin ice as a concept doesnt exist in particle physics and would not be discussed outside solid state?
I claim the article is about solid-state physics. Otherwise, any claim that doesn't appear in my comment ... ? Not my claim.
The major problem with understanding articles like this is that while it typically doesn't involve quantum entanglement, it's close enough to quantum that it makes the science writers get all giddy about the words they are throwing around and they do their usual "why inform the reader about what is going on when we can just make them go Gee Whiz" schtick.
The key word is "quasi-particle" which is somewhat less exotic than it sounds. It is a combination of what you might call real or normal particles that produces some sort of pattern in it that itself acts like a particle of some sort. The resulting "quasi-particle" can have all kinds of interesting properties that normal particles can't have on their own, but what makes them "quasi" is that they can't exist on their own. They're intrinsically on top of some substrate of normal particles.
One of the simplest quasiparticle is the "electron hole". Take a lattice of some electrically neutral substance. Remove one electron from it. There is now an "electron hole" in it. You can treat that hole like a particle now. It can "move" to another location by having the real electrons change places. It can "flow" through a series of such events. You can model a lot of things with "electron holes" that act in very particle-like ways. But they don't exist on their own. This one is simple because you don't even need quantum mechanics to get a hold of it in your head.
Many more complicated scenarios are possible. Many interesting things can happen with them. Most, if not all, news articles about "new phases of matter", which science writers love to write about only slightly less than making "woo woo" motions with their fingers while talking about quantum entanglement, are new quasiparticles of some sort. This is somewhat less interesting than they think because if you include quasiparticles as "phases of matter" then there are already hundreds or thousands, but the science writer wants to write an article about every single one of them as if the list is now "solid, liquid, gas, Weyl semimetals" and then write the next article as if the list is now "solid, liquid, gas, ELECTRON HOLE" and so on and so on for each new quasiparticle.
But from this perspective, the list hasn't been so short as "solid, liquid, gas" for well over a hundred years now, and while adding a new one is often good science, it has also been "just" another one of thousands for a while now.
This post is not an explanation of "spin ice", "Wely fermions", or anything else; what this is is the "secret decoder ring" to remove the wiggly fingers and the "woo woo" noises the science writers add to this topic every time they write about it and to give you the terms you can Google and start reading up on what is one of the most interesting and productive fields in the hard sciences right now. Everyone loves to talk about how stuck particle physics is, but physics is making a lot of interesting findings in the field of making the particles we know about sing and dance in all sorts of new and interesting ways.
> One of the simplest quasiparticle is the "electron hole". Take a lattice of some electrically neutral substance. Remove one electron from it. There is now an "electron hole" in it. You can treat that hole like a particle now. It can "move" to another location by having the real electrons change places. It can "flow" through a series of such events. You can model a lot of things with "electron holes" that act in very particle-like ways. But they don't exist on their own. This one is simple because you don't even need quantum mechanics to get a hold of it in your head.
An electron hole seems like a simple, almost silly idea at first. Isn't it just like the hole in a sliding puzzle game. You move a neighbouring electron into the hole, so the hole disappears and a new hole appears at the neighbouring position. It seems to "move". Does this deserve a special name like "quasi-particle"?
But it's not like the hole in a sliding puzzle!
An electron hole moves with inertia, like a real particle. It behaves as if it has mass: You can push it and it starts moving. If you push it more, it accelerates more. But unlike a sliding puzzle, when you stop pushing, the electron hole carries on moving at the same speed.
It keeps going by itself in whatever direction it was going, until it's pushed in a different direction, or bounces off something.
You can't push a sliding puzzle hole at a diagonal angle, let alone push it that way and then watch the puzzle hole keep on moving that way by itself like an independently moving object, as far as it can go until it hits something.
If you had a large sliding puzzle with two holes, you wouldn't expect to be able to send them towards each other, bounce off each other and continue.
And you certainly can't perform double slit interference with sliding puzzle holes. You can, in principle (hard in practice), make electron hole beams and interfere them.
Things like holes and other patterns in matter behave remarkably like real, coherent particles, even though they are just patterns.
Thank you for that fantastic elaboration. I'll have to put it in my pocket for future discussions to link to.
Working with this sort of thing is on my short list of "if I had it to do all over again". It's really fascinating stuff.
Pretty interesting, I recently build an nth order spherical harmonics encoder that can encode the electronic structure of a local environment (of n Å) into a high dimensional fingerprint. We can then use this to search against a big TB dataset of known structures we built to see if we can find analogous configurations. I've started building the structure in the article, I'm interested to see what a search turns up.
Neat! Which spherical harmonics descriptor are you using, and what does your in-house TB dataset cover? What do you plan to do with any matches you find?
If you think this is cool/valuable, I just want to point out that this work is being paid for by the DOE Office of Science (BES division), uses the NSF National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and is using money from an NSF CAREER award (“Acknowledgments” section under “Funding” in the actual paper [1]). The former is facing a cut of 14% [2] (The Office of Science overall is seeing a similar cut), the second is facing a 40% cut [3], and the latter appears to be destroyed entirely (no money requested) [4] in documents released by these agencies for FY2026 (executive budget).
This research is also supported by Chinese funding agencies, who I imagine will not be engaging such senseless hamstringing of their national scientific organs…
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr6202
[2] See page 5 of https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/doe-fy-20...
[3] See page “Facilities - 5” of https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF-FY26-CJ-Entir...
[4] See page “Summary Tables - 1” of the link in [3].
The focus for the next decades is set for war, the cuts everywhere are not random. I doubt that there can be done much in the near future.
When commenters say stuff like this I never know if they mean grants that went to funding utter taxpayer theft like this: https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/04/national-science-foundatio...
Or real science.
So I just tune out.
Your link seems unrelated to the topic of this article? I gave the line items for the research conducted in the OP.
A good faith reading of your comment leads me to guess you might take issue with a small number of unrelated NSF CAREER awards going to research you don’t find worthwhile (such as those alluded to in your link). But the vast majority of CAREER awards fund what I would imagine you would consider “real science” [1], like the content of OP.
So please do not tune out!
[1] You can count them here in the list of all CAREER awards: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearchResult?PIId=&P...
Considering they provided multiple references to exactly what they were talking about, what gave you issues? They're not talking about what you linked, and they are talking about what they linked.
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