Molecular gases represent a new class of artificial quantum matter, but they have a serious limitation: when molecules collide, they tend to vanish almost immediately. This rapid loss has made it difficult to use these gases for studying strongly interacting systems, where collisions are central to the physics.
Now researchers from Radboud University and Columbia University have found a way to suppress that collisional loss. Their result, reported in Phys.org, makes an extremely stable quantum gas possible, allowing the molecules to interact without being destroyed in the process.
Because the two collaborating groups appear to agree on the outcome, the finding stands as a consistent advance. The work is expected to serve as a new experimental lens for probing the behavior of strongly interacting quantum matter, which has been hard to access with previous approaches.