A liquid made up of spinning particles behaves a lot like water - until you take a closer look.

Working in the Irvine Lab at the University of Chicago, we created a chiral liquid by spinning a collection of thousands to millions of colloidal magnets using a rotating magnetic field. These particles self-assembled into a medium that behaves a lot like a normal liquid - you can watch it flow past obstacles and form droplets. But, by adding rotation to the picture, we introduced surface waves which we discussed in detail here. In addition, Physics Today published a short summary, and Quanta Magazine mentioned this project alongside the rest of the lab's efforts.

V. Soni*, E. S. Bililign*, S. Magkiriadou*, Stefano Sacanna, D. Bartolo, M. J. Shelley, W. T. M. Irvine. The odd free surface flows of a colloidal chiral fluid, Nature Physics 15 (2019).