Tipsy Superfluids: Glimpsing off-kilter quantum clouds

Physicists last year created an exotic state of matter previously unattainable in the laboratory but whose characteristics theorists have debated for more than 40 years. The latest probes of the new state suggest that the material—a cloud of ultracold atoms that’s imbalanced with regard to a quantum property known as spin—behaves differently than most theorists had anticipated.