A RARE quantum state has been discovered in a pigment first made in China 2000 years ago.
Among the highest chemical achievements of the Han dynasty was the creation of the valuable dye now called Han purple. It contains barium, copper and silicon and has the formula BaCuSi2O6. Last week, an international team of researchers announced the pigment has a strange property (): at temperatures near absolute zero, it turns into a state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which every particle shares a single quantum state.
Only one quantum property of the atoms in Han purple condenses 鈥� their spin. Physicists toying with spintronic devices, which use spin to process information, could put this to use, says team member Marcelo Jaime of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. 鈥淚t may lead to an entirely new type of spintronics,鈥� he says.
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