Meet the swirlon, a new kind of matter that bends the laws of physics

[Judi Lynn]

By Stephanie Pappas - Live Science Contributor 6 hours ago

Researchers discover a new state of active matter.



(Image credit: Alex Solich/Getty)
Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state.

Physical laws such as Newton's second law of motion — which states that as a force applied to an object increases, its acceleration increases, and that as the object's mass increases, its acceleration decreases — apply to passive, nonliving matter, ranging from atoms to planets. But much of the matter in the world is active matter and moves under its own, self-directed, force, said Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia and the University of Leicester in England. Living things as diverse as bacteria, birds and humans can interact with the forces upon them. There are examples of non-living active matter, too. Nanoparticles known as "Janus particles," are made up of two sides with different chemical properties. The interactions between the two sides create self-propelled movement.

To explore active matter, Brilliantov and his colleagues used a computer to simulate particles that could self-propel. These particles weren't consciously interacting with the environment, Brilliantov told Live Science. Rather, they were more akin to simple bacteria or nanoparticles with internal sources of energy, but without information-processing abilities.

The first surprise was that this active matter behaves very differently than passive matter. Different states of passive matter can coexist, Brilliantov said. For example, a glass of liquid water can gradually evaporate into a gaseous state while still leaving liquid water behind. The active matter, by contrast, didn't coexist in different phases; it was all solid, all liquid or all gas.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/swirlonic-matter-unusual-behavor.html

[Firestorm49]

1. Thanks, JL.

[lagomorph777]

2. Interesting. One of those big unifying ideas, like chaos theory.

[niyad]

3. Thank you for this illuminating find.

[yonder]

4. Simple high school physics.

You have your Swirlon: bigger, faster, agressive but not very bright and orbited by negatively charged minor Swirlons. These particles often swiftly decay, especially after encountering an even larger Swirlonic group and paradoxically enough, the occasional but smaller Swirlenic group.

Then you have your Swirlee: a smaller, more passive, difficult to observe type but very bright. These individuals are often found in smaller, less robust groups of positively charged Swirlies whose motions appear random but are actually highly organized. One or more in this group are often observed with drenched-appearing anterior nucleic extensions.

But seriously JL, thanks for this interesting post.

[Hekate]

5. Fascinating!

[burrowowl]

6. Interesting!

[PatrickforB]

7. Yet another interesting post. Like that one the other day about

the murmuration of starlings - that was an amazing photo the Irish guy took.