Anyone knows if there are examples of such states, which were discovered in very specific conditions in lab, to be found outside? Does creation/discovery of such states help in explaining any hitherto unexplainable observations?
"State of matter" isn't exactly a useful description in this particular case, but it's interesting that enzyme catalysis cannot be explained fully by classical chemistry/physics alone.
The precise state of matter studied in this paper I think is unlikely to exist "naturally".
But yes there are states of matter that exist in nature but are just not obvious until you study them carefully in a lab. For example antiferromagnets exist in nature at naturally cold temperatures (see hematite), but unless you’re looking for them, they just look like normal nonmagnetic solids. Thus they were discovered millennia after ferromagnets.
But there are more exotic states that were first discovered in labs and later theorized to exist in nature, but that have not yet been proven. One example of such a theory is that a superconductivity-like state might occur naturally in neuron stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity
It never ceases to amaze me how many different effects exist in the Universe, waiting for us to discover/exploit. I wonder how many features you could comment out and we'd still be able to evolve, v/s how many of these quirks we depend on for even existing?!
Pretty interesting, I recently build an nth order spherical harmonics encoder that can encode the electronic structure of a local environment (of n Å) into a high dimensional fingerprint. We can then use this to search against a big TB dataset of known structures we built to see if we can find analogous configurations. I've started building the structure in the article, I'm interested to see what a search turns up.