April 23, 2026
Negative Mass
Timothy Birdnow
Vedddy Eeeenterestink!
Scientists have discovered something long theorized - evidence of negative mass in a liquid in a Bose-Einstein Condensate.
A Bose-Einstein Condensate is formed when a gas is cooled to near absolute zero and the bosons (particles with integer spin) go into a collective state and behave as a single entity.
The researchers found that they could produce negative mass in some of the BEC's.
Negative mass was one of those things that Einstein dismissed as a mathematical artifact (much as he did a solution for his E=mcsquared which had a positive number for an electron, something rectified by Paul Dirac and the discovery of the positron in 1932.)
Negative mass would see a reversal of everything we know about matter; it would drop UPWARD and not down. It would move in reverse when you shoved it from behind. Fascinating stuff.
If we could find a way to make it and do so cheaply we would have tools making all sorts of things possible; antigravity to propel spacecraft, etc.
Of course producing minute amounts of the stuff in a Bose Einstein Condensate is a world of difference from making the stuff commercially (just as making antimatter is possible but we can't do it in any quantity). We are a LONG way from antigrav spaceships.
Below is the abstract:
A negative effective mass can be realized in quantum systems by engineering the dispersion relation. A powerful method is provided by spin-orbit coupling, which is currently at the center of intense research efforts. Here we measure an expanding spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate whose dispersion features a region of negative effective mass. We observe a range of dynamical phenomena, including the breaking of parity and of Galilean covariance, dynamical instabilities, and self-trapping. The experimental findings are reproduced by a single-band Gross-Pitaevskii simulation, demonstrating that the emerging features—shock waves, soliton trains, self-trapping, etc.—originate from a modified dispersion. Our work also sheds new light on related phenomena in optical lattices, where the underlying periodic structure often complicates their interpretation.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:31 AM
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