Ultra-cold lithium atoms shedding light on superfluid formation

A new study resolves a long-standing debate about what happens at the microscopic level when matter transitions into a superconducting or superfluid state.Correlations between pairs of atoms in an ultra-cold gas were found to grow suddenly as the system was cooled below the transition temperature.The experiments at Swinburne University of Technology used gases of lithium atoms cooled to temperatures below 100 nano-Kelvin (less than a millionth of a degree above Absolute Zero).