For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A wave of recent experiments is now tearing at those boundaries, revealing ...

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When materials become just one atom thick, melting no longer follows the familiar rules. Instead of jumping straight from solid to liquid, an unusual in-between state emerges, where atomic positions ...

Physicists have watched a quantum fluid do something once thought almost impossible: stop moving. In experiments with ultra-thin graphene, researchers observed a superfluid—normally defined by its ...

Liquid crystal is a state of matter that exhibits properties of both liquid and solid. It can flow like a liquid, while its constituent molecules are aligned as in a solid. Liquid crystal is widely ...