[cosmic_quanta]

New phases of matter uncovered by ultrafast laser pumping is more common than you might think.

Dumping a bunch of energy into a system in less than 30fs (30 x 10^-15s) creates a profoundly non-equilibrium situation. Whatever phase of matter you observe right after will likely have no equilibrium analogue.

> The perpendicular version of the CDW that appears after the burst of laser light has never before been observed in this material, Gedik says. It "just briefly flashes, and then it's gone," Kogar says, to be replaced by the original CDW pattern which immediately pops back into view.

The interesting bit is here:

> Gedik points out that "this is quite unusual. In most cases, when you add energy to a material, you reduce order."

That is what's great about this. New phases of matter in ultrafast experiments are old news.

[noobermin]

It's upsetting. Reminds me of when the CERN people made that paper about modulated plasma wave acceleration, and pretended they were the first to do it, or at least the popular press did. You only realize it when it's your field (as do I here) but we in physics ought to talk to each other more.

[dredmorbius]

An example I'd encountered was a set of papers out of the US Naval Research Lab on fuel synthesis (electricity + seawater => hydrocarbon jet fuel). The citations dated only to the mid/late 1990s, though it turns out prior art and development date to at least the 1960s (for electically-based fuel synthesis), the 1930s if Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from coal is included.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy...

The impression generated was tremendously misleading.

I ended up digging into the history myself:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/29ihl7/us_doe_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...

[pas]

Anyone following science (or tech, or medicine, or anything) news will (ought to) realize how over-hyped and fluff-heavy every press release is. Real breakthroughs are very few and far between, because progress seems incremental. And because usually those breakthroughs are unseen, uninteresting, not even press-release worthy, because we haven't realized its potential. Then someone tries out that new thing for that old problem, and gets maybe decent numbers, usually just meh. Then slowly it builds, and then eventually comes the paradigm shift. But at that point it's the waiting game, slow march of better and better engineering, getting better trade offs, and so on.

[cosmic_quanta]

To be fair, the authors are not claiming that this is the first time, only that this is the first time in this material. As you say, the press makes it up to be different than it is.

[peter_d_sherman]

"New phases of matter uncovered by ultrafast laser pumping is more common than you might think."

Did not know this, until now! (But then again, I am not a professional Physicist, so I claim exemption from having to know!)

Anyway, very interesting!