One of the most exciting physics discoveries in recent years may not be a discovery after all. Reports of “supersolidity,” in which solid helium flows through itself without friction, may turn out be something far more ordinary: the everyday stiffening of a material.
This new conclusion comes from the same scientist who in 2004 first reported evidence for supersolidity. Now, in a paper published October 8 in Physical Review Letters, Moses Chan of Penn State says he has repeated that original experiment, eliminating more possible sources of experimental error and saw no hints of supersolidity.
“It would have been neat if the phenomenon holds up,” Chan says. But instead, he says, he feels “a sense of disappointment.”
A discovery of supersolidity would be the stuff Nobel Prizes are made of. Superfluids are quantum liquids that flow according to unusual rules, such as up and over the sides of a container; supersolids would be the solid equivalent, in which atoms somehow leave their crystalline lattice and flow effortlessly within it.