Nature press release for 3 January issue
[415039] PHYSICS: NEW STATE OF MATTER (pp39-44; N&V) Physicists in Germany have made a new type of matter - a patterned fluid - by trapping globules of a quantum liquid in a regular array of dimples. This takes the study of ultracold matter literally into a new phase. Immanuel Bloch of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit'¤t in Munich, and MPI für Quantenoptik in Garching, Germany, and co-workers loaded a Bose-Einstein condensate (an ultracold vapour of rubidium atoms that act en masse) into a three-dimensional light interference pattern generated by several laser beams. The condensate underwent a reversible quantum phase transition as the intensity of the lasers increased, report Bloch an