Electron Fission

Scott_Marks writes: "A Science News story this week reports on some research by Humphrey J. Maris of Brown University predicting that in liquid helium electrons could be split in two. This seems not to be just your sorry-Dr.-Einstein probablistic one-thing-in-two-places effect, but an actual separation. (Does that distinction even make sense in the quantum world? Over my head.) Maris will give a talk on this later this month near me at N. C. State, so I'll be there. Makes me wonder what it would be like for a physics colloquium to get Slashdotted."

Comments

Re:Gee, thanks.

[blameless]

Yeah, a subscription to the magazine. I don't mind having to register to read a NY Times article, but why post something about a story we can't read?

That kind of makes it difficult to have an intelligent discussion on the matter.

a little blurb I found

[grnarrow]

I tried to find more info about his work online, but there doesn't seem to be much. The best I came up with was a short press release about his work and its appearance in a journal article.

Mindpixel - help the Digital Mind Modeling Project.

Re:a little blurb I found

[Sir Tristam]

Hmmm... Quite interesting. The main meat of the process:

According to quantum theory, the state of a particle is described as its wave function. The probability that the particle will be found in any position is proportional to the square of the wave function at that point in space. Maris' theory considers what happens to electrons when they are immersed in liquid helium at a temperature of one degree above absolute zero. Previous experiments have shown that an electron in helium becomes trapped in a bubble approximately 100-billionths of an inch in diameter. The bubble drifts through the liquid with the wave function of the electron confined inside it.

Maris shows that when the bubble is illuminated with infrared light, the bubble can divide into two smaller bubbles each containing a part of the wave function of the electron. These two bubbles can then move independently through the liquid and become separated from each other.

I think that the important thing to realize here is that they are talking about the wave function of the electron being inside the bubble and splitting in two, not the actual electron. IANATP (Theoretical Physicist), but if I recall correctly (especially since the quote above agrees...), the wave function of a particle is actually a measure of the probability that that particle will be found in a particular place when you look for it. This press release seems to be nothing more that Schrodin ger 's Cat, but with an electron instead of a cat (the SPCA is happy about that). I suspect that if you check in the bubbles for electrons, one would have an electron, and the other would not. It is the act of observing that causes the wave function to collapse into an actual physical property. So, I don't think that we're actually talking about electron fission here, but electron wave function fission.

The Nature of Electron Fission

[RainMan496]

The article, in my opinion, is horribly vague, to the point where it is very difficult to discern what it actually means. Is it, as someone else suggested, regarding the fission of electron wave functions? Or is an electron being physically split here? The differences between the two are astronomical. Splitting a wave function merely relates to separating into two parts a function which will relate to an observer the probability of the electron being found in a certain place at a certain time. However, to actually split an electron would be truly something; as a member of the lepton family, electrons were understood to be the fundamental building blocks of matter. Its accompanying neutrino, along with the muon particle, the tau particle, and their accompanying neutrinos, made up the leptons. The leptons, in turn, with the six quarks, comprised the "chassis" of the Standard Model, that is the theory describing the nature of matter, in which the quarks were affected by the strong nuclear force, and the leptons were not. Were an electron to be actually physically split, it would open up a whole new realm of particle and subatomic physics. Wow. It would be like smashing the pieces of the smashed pieces of the smashed pieces of the atom. It would be greatly appreciated if someone could clarify the nature of the statement in question.

Re:The Nature of Electron Fission

[Mad Hughagi]

Firstly, I'm going to just let an opinion fly about reductionist principles in general - even if they do bust the electron into bits, would it even matter in the grand scheme? One of the things in physics is that most theories are only valid for certain scales and they are only approximations to the next level down (or up I suppose). Although this would lead us into a new level of research it would be the exact same thing over again. Important none the less but I don't think too many physicists would be peeing their pants in glee over it.

As for the question about the difference between the wave function and the particle splitting up, I don't think this article means to determine what is actually seen. It only states that a very interesting behaviour of this experimental apparatus was noticed (multiple bubble formation when only one was expected) that might indicate the existance of electrinos (the proposed name for the remains of the electron) and that further experiments are going to be undertaken to consolidate what is actually observed.

The researcher is very hopeful that he has in fact observed electrinos however the physics community as a whole is skeptic, so I guess we'll have to wait until a further date.

Re:Here's what will really blow your mind...

[Mad Hughagi]

I guess I didn't really say that too well. I agree that the wave nature of the electron is very important in this experiment, however, I would find it hard to have a discontinuity in the wave function of the electron (as the doctor states) without it splitting into two physical entities. In a double slit experiment, you only see the electrons hit the screen one at a time - you don't record a wave hitting the screen. It is only after many have hit the screen, and you record where they all hit, that the pattern emerges. In effect I'm saying that you can't directly observe the wave function (it is just a consequence of the statistical nature of QM) and therefor it couldn't 'make' bubbles which can be observed.

If you're very interested in these types of QM musings I highly suggest reading "Wholeness and The Implicate Order" by David Bohm. It is definately one of the most interesting books (and easy to follow) I've read in some time.

Electrinos!

[Mad Hughagi]

This article aired on the AIP physics news update last month. You can check out their take on it here:

http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2000/split/pnu50 1-1.htm

It's quite an interesting concept, it will be cool to see what further experiments reveal.

Something important

[neoevans]

It sure would be a kick in the ass for the Physics community if this could actually work. Einstein said that giving the actual location of an electron at any given point in time would be next to impossible, and what has always erked me about this, is how it makes matter transportation impossible.
I mean, forget the bombs here, let's work on Teleportation. It has been argued that the theory itself relies on being able to take a "picture" of all the matter of an object and re-creating that energy in the form of matter where one would be teleported to...
If they can now deal with the problem of electron-location, then this could actually WORK!

Re:Here's what will really blow your mind...

[Mad Hughagi]

Ok, here's the flaw with that arguement, (one that is often made with quantum mechanics since it is often presented with an over-emphisis placed on the 'reality' of the wave function) the wave function would not have the ability to 'make' the bubble in the first place. If you found the electron in the bubble, you would also only find one bubble, the one with the electron in it! The other bubble would have never existed! The fact that there are multiple bubbles either implies that the electron actually split up, only to recombine later, or that there is some other effect creating the extra bubbles.