The sound, which until now was only known to have been heard in neutron stars, makes this breakthrough a mammoth of an achievement. The physicists, a team of six, a part of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms published their findings in the journal 'Science'.
A perfect fluid is characterised by a perfect flow, which in simple terms, refers to a liquid that offers the least friction or viscosity to the flow of soundwaves. It offers the least heat or resistance to whatever pipe that it flows thorugh.
Speaking to MIT's news website, Martin Zwerlein expressed his elation and also the implications of his team's achievement. "It’s quite difficult to listen to a neutron star,” says Martin Zwierlein, the Thomas A. Frank Professor of Physics at MIT. “But now you could mimic it in a lab using atoms, shake that atomic soup and listen to it, and know how a neutron star would sound,” he said.
To do this, they first generated a gas of strongly interacting fermions. A fermion,...
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