What happens when you take a purple pigment from those ancient terra cotta warriors in China, subject it to high magnetic fields, and low Kelvin temperatures? It undergoes a matter transformation that occurs at the Quantum Critical Point where
Han Purple undergoes dimensional reduction and changes from 3D to 2D.
"The magnetic waves in the pigment exist in a unique state of matter called a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC), so named for its theoretical postulation by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein. In the BEC state, the individual waves (associated with magnetism from pairs of copper atoms in BaCuSi206) lose their identities and condense into one giant wave of undulating magnetism. As the temperature is lowered, this magnetic wave becomes sensitive to vertical arrangement of individual copper layers, which are shifted relative to each other -" a phenomenon known as "geometrical frustration." This makes it difficult for the magnetic wave to exist in the third up-down dimension any longer, and leads to a change to a two-dimensional wave, in very much the same way as ripples are confined to the surface of a pond. "
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