Monday, June 1, 2026
Scientists Just Unlocked a Phase of Matter That Was Never Supposed to Exist
Researchers have done something quietly extraordinary: they built a new state of matter from scratch, one that physicists theorised could exist but that no one had ever actually managed to create or hold stable. Published last week in the journal Science, the work comes from teams at Brown University and the University of Michigan, and it sits right at the intersection of materials science, nanotechnology, and quantum physics.
If that sounds abstract, here’s the short version: the way atoms arrange
themselves inside a metal determines almost everything about that metal’s
properties, its strength, how it conducts electricity, how it responds to heat.
Scientists have long known that metals can shift between different
arrangements, but the brief, unstable “in-between” states during those shifts
have always been too fleeting to study or use. This team figured out how to
freeze those in-between states in place and in doing so, accidentally created a
material with remarkable quantum properties that work at room temperature.
Start With the Basics: How Metals Are Built on the Inside
To understand what’s new here, it helps to picture what a metal actually
looks like at the atomic scale. Metals aren’t a uniform blob, their atoms are
arranged in precise, repeating geometric patterns called crystal structures.
Two of the most common are:
Face-centred
cubic (FCC): Imagine a cube with one atom at each corner and
one atom at the centre of each flat face. This is the tightest possible packing
arrangement for spherical atoms, think of stacking oranges at a market. Gold,
silver, and copper all use this structure.
Body-centred
cubic (BCC): Again a cube with atoms at each corner, but this
time just a single atom at the very centre of the cube’s body, not its faces.
It’s a bit less tightly packed. Iron at room temperature uses this arrangement.
Some metals
can switch between these two structures when heated. Iron, for example,
transitions from BCC to FCC at 912 degrees Celsius. Steel manufacturers have
exploited this transition for centuries, it’s what makes it possible to harden
or toughen steel through careful heating and cooling. But the precise mechanism
of how atoms
reorganise during that transition has always been murky, because the
intermediate states are so short-lived they almost don’t exist.
The Missing
Middle: A Theorised but Never-Seen Phase
One leading model for how the FCC-to-BCC transition works, known as the
Nishiyama-Wassermann pathway, proposes a set of transition phases between FCC
and BCC that are more ephemeral due to their lower symmetry. Think of it like a
door swinging between two positions, the interesting physics happens in the
middle, when the door is halfway open. The problem is that the “halfway”
position is inherently unstable; the door wants to be either open or closed,
not hovering in between.
“Materials scientists have cared about how to control the amount of FCC and
BCC in their metals for a long time, but the transitions between these phases
have been hard to study because they are so unstable,” said Tim Moore, a study
co-author and assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan.
“Being able to observe these structures is a fundamental breakthrough in
materials science, and it gives us greater control over nanomaterial
engineering.”
The Clever Solution: Build It With Nanoparticle LEGO
Instead of trying to catch a fleeting phase during an actual metal
transition, the team took a different approach entirely, they built the
in-between structure deliberately, from the bottom up, using custom-designed
nanoparticles.
The researchers synthesized silver nanoparticles shaped like truncated
octahedra, which they call “mecons.” These particles resemble a diamond-like
shape with their corners cut off, creating a 14-sided geometry. The key insight
is that this shape sits geometrically between a sphere (which naturally packs
into FCC arrangements) and a cube (which leads toward BCC). By tuning the exact
shape, more rounded or more cubic, the team could nudge the particles toward
different structural arrangements.
They then coated the particles with long molecular chains that acted like
sticky connectors and allowed them to assemble into larger, ordered structures
known as nanoparticle superlattices. The researchers found that these molecular
coatings played a critical role in stabilizing arrangements that matched the
transitional structures predicted by the Nishiyama-Wassermann pathway.
“You can kind of picture them like hairy particles,” said Moore. “The hairs
are flexible enough that the particles have more freedom to shift, but they
also fit together nicely, which allows the particles to mesh together.”
The whole process was verified using both physical experiments and detailed
computer simulations run by Sharon Glotzer’s group at Michigan, one of the
world’s leading labs for computational materials science.
“Our work is a little bit like kids playing with LEGO blocks,” said Ou
Chen, associate professor of chemistry at Brown and a corresponding author. “We
synthesize unique nanoscale building blocks and stack them into interesting
structures. In this case, we were able to stabilize these theorized
transitional structures and demonstrate important quantum optical properties.”
The Surprise: Quantum Effects at Room Temperature
Here is where the discovery takes an unexpected turn. When the team shone
light on the new superlattice structures, they observed something that doesn’t
normally happen outside of a laboratory cryostat cooled to near absolute zero.
The silver nanoparticles exhibited deep-strong light-matter coupling a
quantum optical regime where the vibrations of electrons within the
nanoparticles become entangled in unison with incident light waves.
To unpack that: electrons in silver naturally oscillate when hit by light,
this is the phenomenon behind silver’s characteristic lustre and is called
plasmon resonance. In this new structure, those oscillations don’t just respond
to light, they synchronise with it so completely that the electrons and the
light become quantum mechanically entangled. They behave as a single quantum
system.
This kind of coupling is a big deal in quantum physics. It’s typically only
achievable at temperatures close to absolute zero, using elaborate equipment.
However, the new material appears to display this behaviour at room
temperature, a finding that could provide a foundation for developing future
materials used in quantum computing, sensing technologies, and other advanced
quantum systems.
Why This Matters: The Applications on the Horizon
Discovering a new phase of matter is significant in its own right, it
expands our fundamental map of what physical reality can look like. But the
practical implications here are considerable.
Quantum
computing. One of the biggest obstacles to building practical quantum computers
is that quantum effects are fragile. They typically collapse at anything above
extremely low temperatures, requiring expensive cooling systems that make
quantum computers impractical for most settings. A material that exhibits
quantum entanglement at room temperature is potentially transformative, it
could form the basis of quantum processors, memory, or communication channels
that don’t require cryogenic infrastructure.
Quantum
sensing. Systems that exploit light-matter entanglement can detect physical
changes, magnetic fields, chemical concentrations, tiny forces, with
extraordinary precision. Room-temperature quantum sensors could find
applications in medical imaging, navigation, environmental monitoring, and
security.
Materials
design by blueprint. Perhaps the broadest implication is the
methodology itself. The work provides a new recipe for using custom-shaped
nanoparticles to engineer entirely new classes of materials with tailored
properties. Rather than discovering useful materials by trial and error or by
accident, scientists may increasingly be able to design them rationally,
specify the property you want, then engineer the nanoparticle shape and coating
that produces it. This is materials science moving from craft to architecture.
Understanding
metals we already use. On the fundamental side, being able to study the
FCC-BCC transition in slow motion, in a stable, controllable material, could
improve our understanding of metallurgy in ways that translate to better
steels, alloys, and structural materials. The properties of the metals in an
aircraft, a bridge, or a ship’s hull are governed by these crystal transitions.
Understanding them better means engineering them better.
The Bigger
Picture
“Anytime you’re able to identify a new phase of matter, new applications
are going to emerge,” Chen said. That’s not hype, it’s the pattern of
scientific history. The discovery of semiconductors led to the transistor and
the entire digital age. Superconductivity, discovered in 1911, is still
yielding new applications a century later. The discovery of graphene, a
single-atom-thick phase of carbon, sparked a revolution in materials research
that continues today.
This new phase won’t transform technology overnight. The gap between a
laboratory result and a commercial product is always long and full of
engineering challenges. But what happened in this paper is the first step:
proof of existence. Scientists now know this state of matter can be made,
stabilised, and studied. The door to exploiting it is open.
Read the
original research: Nagaoka, Y. et al. (2026). Stabilizing in-transition phases
of superlattices through shape control of silver nanocrystals. Science,
392(6801), 951. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady6472
Full story from Brown University: https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-05-28/superlattice
Source: Scientists Just Unlocked a Phase of Matter That Was Never Supposed to Exist – Scents of Science
NASA-European Sea Level Mission Homes in on El Niño - EARTH
The international Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich sea
level satellite observed a swell of warm water, called a Kelvin wave, moving
eastward in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, arriving off the South American coast
in May. Warm Kelvin waves often precede El Niño events.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sea level data from a satellite launched by NASA and European partners
shows that a swell of warm water hundreds of miles wide has arrived in the
Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, a sign that El Niño will likely
emerge later in the year. Because water expands as it warms, a rise in
elevation of an area of the ocean indicates increasing ocean temperatures.
El Niños can cause heavy
precipitation in some regions and deficits in others, influencing daily life
and commerce around the world.
Launched in 2020 by NASA and led by
ESA (European Space Agency) for the E.U. Copernicus Programme, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite measures and maps water height for the
entire ocean every 10 days, down to fractions of an inch. In the case of El
Niño, the satellite tracks what are called warm Kelvin waves.
These waves typically form after
brief periods when winds over the far western equatorial Pacific Ocean shift
from prevailing easterlies — moving from east to west — to westerlies. That
effect, combined with a general weakening of easterly winds along the equator,
causes water in the tropics of the western Pacific to get warmer and sea levels
to rise. The wave that forms then propagates east for several weeks, eventually
reaching South America and causing water off the coast to heat up and rise. An
El Niño develops as multiple Kelvin waves appear over the course of several
months, and the warm water accumulates off the shores of Colombia, Ecuador, and
Peru.
“While this year’s event started a
bit later than the big El Niños of 2015 and 1997, it’s beginning to catch up,”
said Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Southern California and project scientist for Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich.
“We’ll see how big it gets.”
Measurements from Sentinel-6
Michael Freilich show a small Kelvin wave forming around Micronesia in late
January and dissipating by mid-February. A new wave emerged in early March,
then moved east over time. By mid-May, the seas around Peru were more than 5.9
inches (15 centimeters) higherthan long-term averages.
“NASA’s observation of El Niño uses
sea level satellites like Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich to track massive Kelvin
waves as they cross the Pacific, capture changes in Earth’s ocean
thermodynamics, improve forecasts of weather extremes, and help communities
prepare for potential coastal hazards,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, lead
program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Stay tuned as more ocean
stories continue to unfold.”
Tracking El Niño
Fishermen in the 1600s coined the
name El Niño — Spanish for “the boy,” a reference to the birth of baby Jesus —
because it tended to intensify around Christmastime. Warmer waters meant they
would catch fewer fish.
Warmer sea surface temperatures in
the central and eastern Pacific affect atmospheric circulation patterns
worldwide by shifting the jet stream, which impacts storm tracks. This can lead
to heavy rain and snow in some areas and unusual heat and dryness in others.
How far away those impacts appear depends on the strength of the El Niño.
In more modest events, like the
ones that began in 2018 and 2023, impacts such as drought and flooding were
mostly seeb in and around the tropical Pacific. Large El Niños, like the one in
2015-2016, reach much farther, causing drought in Africa and flooding in
California.
El Niños usually peak between
November and January, so it will be several months before the largest impacts
become clear.
“Every El Niño is different,” said
JPL sea level researcher Severine Fournier, deputy project scientist for
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. “But they almost always make for a hot year and
big changes in rainfall in parts of the globe.”
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich is the
current official reference satellite for global sea level measurements. Launched in
2020, it is continuing a legacy started in 1992 by the TOPEX/Poseidon
satellite. A series of successors have carried the baton since then, and the
latest, Sentinel-6B, which launched November 2025, will take over for its predecessor by the end of 2026.
More about Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, named
after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, is one of
two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of
Service) mission.
Sentinel-6/Jason-CS, a part of the
European Union’s Earth observation programme called Copernicus, was jointly
developed by ESA, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of
Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), with funding support from the European Commission and
technical support on performance from the French space agency CNES (Centre
National d’Études Spatiales). Spacecraft monitoring and control, as well as the
processing of all the altimeter science data, is carried out by EUMETSAT on
behalf of the European Union’s Copernicus Programme, with the support of all
partner agencies.
A division of Caltech in Pasadena,
JPL contributed three science instruments for each Sentinel-6 satellite:
the Advanced
Microwave Radiometer, the Global
Navigation Satellite System – Radio Occultation, and the Laser
Retroreflector Array. NASA also contributed launch services, ground systems supporting
operation of the NASA science instruments, the science data processors for two
of these instruments, and support for the U.S. members of the international
Ocean Surface Topography Science Team.
To learn more about Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/sentinel-6
Source: NASA-European Sea Level Mission Homes in on El Niño - NASA
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