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Purple Haze

More than 2,000 years ago, craftsmen in China created a fiery-violet pigment from barium-copper silicates that historians now call Han purple.Once prized by artisans for painting such icons as the Xi'an terra cotta warriors, the pigment is now finding new fans in the world of physics and may help guide future research into high-temperature superconductivity, quantum computers and other materials at the forefront of technology research.

Posted by C1ay
12 July, 2006 07:07:11

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Using extremely strong magnetic fields--800,000 times that of Earth's--and temperatures close to absolute zero, researchers converted Han purple into an unusual state called a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, individual electrons within the pigment's atoms arrange themselves so their "spins" form a single, magnetic structure with three dimensions.

Further, the researchers discovered that when the Han purple condensate cools to temperatures even closer to absolute zero, the magnetic structure loses a dimension--each layer of atoms loses its influence over adjacent layers above or below it--and the substance begins to act like a flat, 2-dimensional magnet. This is the first time scientists have seen this behavior, and they believe it occurs because the atom layers that make up the pigment are offset.

Source: NSF

Comments (3 posted):

ronthepon on 12 July, 2006 03:24:01

Han purple into BEC. This is a very interesting topic.

Mercedes Benzene on 12 July, 2006 03:31:34

Turtle on 12 July, 2006 03:45:14

I love it when humans do strange things like this... Scientist1: "I wonder what would happen when I expose this substance to magnetic fields 800,000 times stronger than earth's..." Scientist2: "Hmmmm... let's go to the lab, and try it out." Even more strangely delightful is that humans millenia ago wondered equally & now we wonder what answers their wonderings produced. The German artifact preservation experts� discovery created a lot of excitement and raised many new questions in the field of archeology: �How did the ancient Chinese people produce BaCuSi4O and BaCuSi2O6? Transportation limited information exchange in ancient times. Thus, dyes were prepared from materials found in nature in each region. Moreover, today�s people were not able to produce BaCuSi2O6 with modern technology until just a couple decades ago. How could Chinese people possibly have the technology to produce BaCuSi2O6 in 200 B.C.?� http://www.asianresearch.org/articles/2161.html I wonder what Purple Haze tastes like?;)