When elements are cooled from a gaseous state under various pressures they will naturally condense into clusters of two, eight, twenty, forty or eighty-two atoms.

Quite often these Superatoms will exhibit characteristics of different elements of the periodic table, but with unusual magnetic properties.

Superatoms were discovered in the 1980s when Walter Knight and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that groups of sodium atoms can share electrons amongst themselves.