In 1924, two scientists, Albert Einstein and Satyendra Bose predicted a 5^th state of matter which would occur at very very low temperatures.

But this state of matter was discovered for the first time in 1995 by Wolfgang Ketterle and his team of graduate students. In 2002, Ketterle and two other scientists received the highest award in science for discovering Bose-Einstein condensate.
A plasma is a hot ionized gas consisting of approximately equal numbers of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons. The characteristics of plasmas are significantly different from those of ordinary neutral gases so that plasmas are considered a distinct "fourth state of matter." For example, because plasmas are made up of electrically charged particles, they are strongly influenced by electric and magnetic fields (see figure) while neutral gases are not. An example of such influence is the trapping of energetic charged particles along geomagnetic field lines to form the Van Allen radiation belts.

In addition to externally imposed fields, such as the Earth's magnetic field or the interplanetary magnetic field, the plasma is acted upon by electric and magnetic fields created within the plasma itself through localized charge concentrations and electric currents that result from the differential motion of the ions and electrons. The forces exerted by these fields on the charged particles that make up the plasma act over long distances and impart to the particles' behavior a coherent, collective quality that neutral gases do not display. (Despite the existence of localized charge concentrations and electric potentials, a plasma is electrically "quasi-neutral," because, in aggregate, there are approximately equal numbers of positively and negatively charged particles distributed so that their charges cancel

                                                             BY : Chloe Elizabeth Sng  MO4