Physicists Detect Elusive Orbiton By "Splitting" Electron

ananyo writes "Condensed-matter physicists have managed to detect the third constituent of an electron — its 'orbiton'. Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them the designation of a fundamental particle. But in the 1980s, physicists predicted that electrons in a one-dimensional chain of atoms could be split into three quasiparticles: a 'holon' carrying the electron's charge, a 'spinon' carrying its spin and an 'orbiton' carrying its orbital location. In 1996, physicists split an electron into a holon and spinon. Now, van den Brink and his colleagues have broken an electron into an orbiton and a spinon (abstract). Orbitons could also aid the quest to build a quantum computer — one stumbling block has been that quantum effects are typically destroyed before calculations can be performed. But as orbital transitions are extremely fast, encoding information in orbitons could be one way to overcome that hurdle."

Comments

Fantasy

[countach]

Let's face it... the particle physicists make all this stuff up. Somehow they figured out how to use particle colliders to synthesise crack cocaine, and ever since then the stuff they've been coming out with has been ever more fantastical.

Re:Fantasy

[mwvdlee]

How about bring up something interesting like how Mott insulators [...] are themselves interesting materials

What? You think crack cocaine isn't interesting material?

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Play snarxiv versus arxiv: http://snarxiv.org/ , where computer generated article titles compete with real ones.

Re:Fantasy

[sosume]

You must be new here..

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/user/bgaede

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even think coke could inspire such incredible ideas. It is fascinating that as these guys delve deeper, things stop being smaller, and instead they start being more fundamental properties of nature. Separating an object into its spin, position and charge components is a so astounding to me. To me, this is all sorts of cool.

Re:Fantasy

[crutchy]

magic mushroom particles

Re:Fantasy

[crutchy]

How about bring up something interesting like how

much of a knobhead you are. Now that would be fucking hilarious.

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

These type of comments are annoying. Inevitably made by some clueless techie (IT, CS, even EE). You're not witty. You're not funny.

And there's where your argument failed. That comment is funny.

Why didn't you just stop at "These type of comments annoy me"?

(Notice that the "me" part is the really important one.)

Re:Fantasy

[professionalfurryele]

Thanks for pointing this out, I'm a particle physicist and this was good for a laugh. That said I will admit to feeling a certain amount of relief when I played snarXiv vs. arXiv and was 10 for 10. There are days when you wonder if some random paper you are reading is just a string of meaningless words.

Re:Fantasy

[Ihmhi]

Man how am I even supposed to take chemistry or physics classes you guys. I cannot draw dots this tiny! PLEASE STOP DISCOVERING SHIT!

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to go smash a glass on the ground and call the resulting particles glasons. Maybe I can get published.

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on mods, let's make the first ever -1, Insightful post =)

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Annoying because you don't have a reasonable response to what he said, perhaps?

Re:Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

How about bring up something interesting like how Mott insulators (in particular, they used strontium-copper oxide) are themselves interesting materials in that they point out flaws in conventional band theory. They really should conduct electricity but are clearly insulators.

Sure, here it goes:

Superior human beings (like you and I, who talk mainly of strontium-copper oxide Mott insultators, and NOT like that un-funny, un-witty clueless IT/CS/even EE!!! techies, fron now on referred as UFUWCICEEE) point out flaws in conventional band theory. That's why we are here in life. In fact, that is because ultimately our superior brain IS a Mott insulator. And this is what prevent us from laughing at such ignorant, banal jokes made by UFUWCICEEEs, because although Mott insulators really should conduct the electricity between our brains, our hearts and our ass, they don't!!!! They are insulators, and so the electrical connection doesn't occur.

I too feel sorry for all those inferior UFUWCICEEEs who also can't stop mispelling "Mott insulator" as "Mott insultator" and other unscientific stuff. Dude, don't we rock? Aren't we so much better? Yeah, I know.

Re:Fantasy

[miscGeek]

Let's face it... the particle physicists make all this stuff up. Somehow they figured out how to use particle colliders to synthesise crack cocaine, and ever since then the stuff they've been coming out with has been ever more fantastical.

Cocaine? Nah, it has to be lsd that they synthesised.

Re:Fantasy

[ZeroSumHappiness]

Problem is that he agrees that the "me" in that statement /would/ be the most important part.

Re:Fantasy

[kungfugleek]

Magnets.

Re:Fantasy

[LeadSongDog]

Cocaine? Nah, it has to be lsd that they synthesised.

Nah, I can't be synthesised, nor even synthesized.

Sigh

[Dyinobal]

Reading stuff like this makes me wish I'd taken more a lot more science in college, maybe went for an entirely different degree. Because honestly I've no idea what they are talking about. If anyone could possibly explain this a bit more I'd be really very happy.

Re:Sigh

[guspasho]

It sounds like they "split" it on paper, mathematically separating the characteristics so they can do computations with them.

I didn't read beyond the summary though, I came in to the comments section looking for confirmation of my theory from a smarter commenter than myself.

Re:Sigh

[guspasho]

Nevermind, mod me down for being dumb. They shot x-rays at the electron and it did something which they measured. No clue what "split" is supposed to mean.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is talking about quasiparticles, that is, collective excitations in some medium that behave as though they were individual particles. Think about a Newton's cradle (that thingy with the balls that click back and forth). When a ball hits one end of the device, a ball emerges from the other end of the device. It's as though there were some kind of particle (there's a mandatory rule that we have to give it a stupid name, so let's call it a ballon) that is transmitted through the device. Now, even though we know that there's no actual particle traveling through the device, we can make calculations as though there were, and this makes things simpler to work with.

Condensed matter physicists work with much more complicated media and their particles are quantum rather than classical, but otherwise the idea is the same. In this case, they have a medium consisting of a strontium cuprate wire, which, of course has lots of electrons in its atoms. They fire a beam at it (like the ball hitting the Newton's cradle) and this excites stuff in the wire, which they find acts like quasiparticles of a particular kind.

The exact kind of quasiparticle is one that acts like an electron, but has no charge or spin, just orbital properties. The spin and charge kinds of quasiparticle were previously discovered, and this completes the set, which is why it's news.

Re:Sigh

[kava_kicks]

Thanks - the analogy is actually pretty helpful.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a great explanation, thanks. Where are those mod points when you need them?

Re:Sigh

[Grayhand]

Glad some one else brought this up. Naming the states and calling them particles is a little like saying three dimensions are three particles. Shouldn't there be a particle for height, width, depth? At a certain stage it's pointless naming to rationalize publishing a paper. Is dividing an electron proving multiple particles or is it in fact like splitting a glass of water and claiming that it's two new atoms? And yes I know there are two atoms making up a glass of water so in this case it would mean four atoms since you can divide a glass of water in half. Unless unique properties can be established for the resulting two electrons then you haven't found two new particles you have simply split a single particle in to two pieces.

Re:Sigh

[JaredOfEuropa]

Shouldn't there be a particle for height, width, depth?

Well, we already have up & down quarks.

Re:Sigh

[mathfeel]

The article is talking about quasiparticles, that is, collective excitations in some medium that behave as though they were individual particles. Think about a Newton's cradle (that thingy with the balls that click back and forth). When a ball hits one end of the device, a ball emerges from the other end of the device. It's as though there were some kind of particle (there's a mandatory rule that we have to give it a stupid name, so let's call it a ballon) that is transmitted through the device. Now, even though we know that there's no actual particle traveling through the device, we can make calculations as though there were, and this makes things simpler to work with.

Condensed matter physicists work with much more complicated media and their particles are quantum rather than classical, but otherwise the idea is the same. In this case, they have a medium consisting of a strontium cuprate wire, which, of course has lots of electrons in its atoms. They fire a beam at it (like the ball hitting the Newton's cradle) and this excites stuff in the wire, which they find acts like quasiparticles of a particular kind.

The exact kind of quasiparticle is one that acts like an electron, but has no charge or spin, just orbital properties. The spin and charge kinds of quasiparticle were previously discovered, and this completes the set, which is why it's news.

More specifically, "separation" refers to the prediction (and now observation) that in the collection of electrons in the 1D wire, orbital, spin, and charge information travel at different speed. This is in particular a low dimensional effect. Hence this is observed in a quantum wire.

Re:Sigh

[crutchy]

it's a marketing term

Re:Sigh

[crutchy]

dammit... now i want a ball clicky thing

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

It just makes it easier to do math with.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you are saying is lt's like when there is a car crash, and the car at the back slams into a long line of cars, the resulting pile up crumples foward through the line of cars, like a partical, or a caron if you will. untill the partical or crash fround emerges from the front of the line of cars.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happened to the holon(s). Did they disappear or were they carried by one or the other of the spinon or orbiton?

Re:Sigh

[AlecC]

Thank you. I think you just stopped my brain melting. I now have a smidgeon of a fragment of a trace of a clue what the article is about.

Re:Sigh

[negativeduck]

I think to a degree you are right. But there is a great deal to physics which as much imagination and wimsey as there is evidence to support it. But when you start to take the macro view and say it's the study of everything then naming becomes important. Considering the orbiting characteristics of an electron are suspected to be unknown. As mentioned in later comments the idea that you can't know where it is until you measure it and thereby change it's path making it impossible to know where it's going to be.

I don't know that I would have used "split" in this context but in an article that's also to be understood by a more broad public I would love to get access to this article outside of the paywall. But Oh well..

But being able to understand and know the orbiting characteristics of the electrons in the cloud would be fantastic. Understanding how that possible orbit affects the interaction with other particles.

(BTW please correct me if I've miss-represented something)

Re:Sigh

[Vahokif]

Philosophically, what makes these particles any more quasi- than electrons? Surely all we have to work with is the sum of their effects in either case.

Re:Sigh

[__aaltlg1547]

But if they didn't actually split a particle the article is misleading.

Why can't scientists review their press coverage?

Re:Sigh

[bughunter]

Think about a Newton's cradle (that thingy with the balls that click back and forth). When a ball hits one end of the device, a ball emerges from the other end of the device. It's as though there were some kind of particle (there's a mandatory rule that we have to give it a stupid name, so let's call it a ballon) that is transmitted through the device.

If I understand the physics of this phenomenon properly (not guaranteed), the "particles" transmitted thru the system of balls already have a name: phonons.

Re:Sigh

[Will.Woodhull]

Shouldn't there be a particle for height, width, depth?

Yeah, they exist, but they are in the realm of mathematicians, not particle physicists. Specifically in the mathematical subdomain of analytical geometry, where these particles are typically called "vectors". Any complex vector of arbitrary direction and length has been shown to be composed of three elemental vectors that, in informal discussions, are called "taller", "wider", and "thicker". (And there are also the anti-elementals of "shorter", "narrower", and "thinner"). It is conjectured that these elemental geometric particles are sufficient for modeling everything in Known Space. And also everything in all the best 3D games, too, for that matter.

Confabulistic nomenclature: it isn't just for particle physicists any more.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a thing as 'fundamental particle' may not exist. Richard Feynman once said that reality could resemble the onion. You peel off one layer just to discover another underneath.

Re:Sigh

[slew]

Unfortunatly, they didn't select my submission, but the idea is basically unbound electrons have some quantum numbers related to spin and charge, but electrons bound to a nucleus have another quantum property related to the orbital they exist in (as a result of all those pesky electron orbital exclusion properties we get a taste of in chemistry 101). This gives the electron a sort of angular momentum quantum property (that is angular momentum isn't a continuous property, but is quantized to certain discrete values).

You might imagine that in the classical sense, if you bumped an electron out of orbiting one nucleus and it be bound to the next nucleus in a lattice, the idea of what angular momentum all the electrons had would be somehow be conserved as a whole in the system on average. Now you toss in the fact that in a lattice, these otherwize local effects of virtually exchanging angular momentum might become delocalized from their actual particles and still maintain the required system average and also (in certain circumstance) still reveal their orignal quantum nature (instead of continuous approximation), that's the effect you have. It isn't a real particle exhibiting quantum effects, but a quasi-particle, but in some sense we've split-off the angular momentum effect from the actual electron that is bound (w/o unbinding the electron).

If you are familiar with semiconductors, you can often hear of people talking about "holes" conducting electric charge like they are electrons, but they aren't electrons: it's a "hole" in a sea of delocalized electrons doing that charge transport. Usually the effects we are interested in are quite classical (say like average current), but in smaller dimensions and lower energy levels we start exhibiting quantum effects of these quasi-particles (say like in supercondutors).

I don't know how this orbiton angular momentum thing will be useable. The effect that was observed was that excitation to higher orbits (higher angular momentums), can propagate in the lattice which seems less useful (eventually you are in such a high excitation energy, you are beyond most interesting quantum effects or effectively unbound). One speculation that I have is that certain insulator properties will be quantized (if certain orbits are unavailable, and the incoming quantum angular momentum is incompatible with the available orbits), and maybe that can be used for some storage capabiltiy or maybe somehow helping spintronics (which is sort of what these folks were thinking).

Hope that helps a bit...

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Forward and back, left and right quarks are still missing. They missed a trick there with top, bottom, strange and charm.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you might be thinking about quasi particles the wrong way. Be less worried if quasi particles are "real" and be more worried if "real" particles, like electrons, are real. All these things are technically just “mathematical models” that balance the equations in the first place..

Re:Sigh

[pscottdv]

Using the word "particle" indicates a particular set of characteristics familiar to physicists. Frankly, most of the short-lived particles that high-energy Physicists work with are really just states with certain characteristics. Guess what? In quantum theory what most people would call "actual particles" are "just states." It's turtles all the way down.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Philosophically, what makes these particles any more quasi- than electrons? Surely all we have to work with is the sum of their effects in either case.

It's the medium. When you look at a quasiparticle, it only exists in the context of its medium, whereas fundamental particles exist in the vacuum. It's a bit like the difference between sound waves and light waves. A sound wave needs something to wave in; a light wave doesn't. Or at least, if it does, the thing it waves is omnipresent throughout the universe and obeys the peculiar laws of relativity; that makes it seem pretty special, doesn't it?

Re:Sigh

[kwoff]

Another example of quasi-particles are phonons. Maybe easier to understand. Phonon makes you think of sound (phonograph). What is sound? It's waves of compression of air molecules. Sound can travel through solids, too, in which case it's waves of compression of the molecules in the solid. Imagine you have a lattice (regular array) of molecules, like a solid crystal, and you tap it on one side. Where you tap, it will push the molecules closer to other molecules, and those will push away other molecules, which then get close to other molecules, which get pushed away, etc.. You can pretend the molecules are connected by springs. (If you take calculus through differential equations, you'll probably solve this kind of boundary-value problem.) So a wave travels through the solid.

The cool thing, mathematically, is that these waves bounce around inside the "box" of the solid as if they were billiard balls (though usually I think the phonons pass through each other, which isn't how billiard balls are, but I mean they bounce off the "walls"). So you can effectively stop thinking of molecules jiggling on springs, and instead think of a kind of "gas" of phonons bouncing around in a box, as if the waves are really particles. That's why they are "quasi" particles. They're not real, but they behave like they are. And like another poster pointed out, how exactly do you define a "particle" anyway? :)

Now where things get really cool is when you shine laser light on a crystal. What is laser light? Either you think of light as electromagnetic waves, or you think of it as particles called photons. (Photo makes you think of light, right? :) So you can think of laser light as a bunch of photons with pretty much all the same energy (plus or minus some relatively small margin; in real experiments you even pass laser light through filters to make the range of energy/wavelength/frequency even narrower). In a technique called Raman spectroscopy (among other techniques), you shine a laser on a crystal and observe the light that bounces back. What happens here? Imagine one of the photons of light going in. It has a certain energy. The photon goes into the crystal and bounces off a phonon (again, like billiard balls). The photon comes back out with more or less energy. Say that it comes out with less energy. Where did that energy go? It smacked into the phonon! So you can actually measure how a material likes to vibrate by looking at the light that bounces back. The peaks in that spectrum of light (measured relative to the energy of the laser) correspond to the phonons. You can even get information by looking at the height and width of the peaks.

So I hope this gives a simpler example of a quasi-particle, and how it can be useful to think this way. The article is a bit misleading, referring to breaking apart an electron, as if it was just one electron. But really they mean a bunch of electrons, acting together in (as the article also said) a "one-dimensional chain of atoms". So very roughly, maybe you can imagine something like a phonon in a "lattice" of electrons.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

An excellent description of this phenomena. Many thanks.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

please correct me if I've miss-represented something

OK.

change it's path

You misrepresented "its" as "it's".

What the fu-

[Anonymous Coward]

You can split an electron into the properties of the electron? including the position and spin?

What the hell? Is this like taking a snowflake from Antarctica and taking the south out of it?

Re:What the fu-

[quintesse]

Maybe it's a bit like this: with quantum mechanics stating that you can't know all the properties of a particle at the same time it might be similar to taking a snowflake and wanting to detect if it's from the north or the south pole, but the moment you do that you can't measure it's shape, color or temperature anymore, in fact turning your snowflake into a southflake because that's the only thing you (can) know about it.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Anonymous Coward]

'holon' , 'spinon' , 'orbiton'

This is fucking ridiculous. We need an IUPAC-like standardized naming convention for these particles.

What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO3?

[kava_kicks]

Can someone actually explain this? I am trying to get my head around a one-dimensional anything ...

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[kava_kicks]

Wikipedia says this about Mott insulators: Mott insulators are a class of materials that should conduct electricity under conventional band theories, but are insulators when measured (particularly at low temperatures). This effect is due to electron-electron interactions which are not considered in conventional band theory.

The heck with splitting the electron...

[Anonymous Coward]

...what about the beer atom?

Re:The heck with splitting the electron...

[crutchy]

are they the particles that enable you to light a fart on fire? i've only ever heard of that being possible when you're drunk

Split shmit!

[Anonymous Coward]

I demand all this BS theoretical physics work STOP IMMEDIATELY until I have my flying goddamned car! I think I speak for just about everyone when I say that.

Re:Split shmit!

[Neil Boekend]

Maybe a flying car can be made feasible with a new kind of drive, like ejecting orbitons from the bottom.This research is in order to understand stuff. Forget about flying cars, maybe FTL drive is possible.

Think about the laser. When is was first conceived of by Einstein he had no way of doing it and no application for it. When Lamb and Retherford made it work there still was no use for it. But think about the world now: Internet, CD/DVD/Blu ray players and even the next gen IC fabs are based on the laser. Many metal parts are cut with lasers, welding is sometimes done with lasers (high presision work) and many measurements are done with lasers. If there had been no theoretical physics last century we wouldn't have lasers. Who knows what we could do with another century of theoretical research?

Re:Split shmit!

[Surt]

It's not going to be FTL. FTL would leave the universe pretty crowded by now. Maybe it will allow exit from the conventional universe, that would explain Fermi's paradox.

Re:Split shmit!

[SuricouRaven]

It'd be less fun than you might think. In these post-9/11 days, do you think the government would actually let people fly their cars? No, even if the engineering problems were solved, the car's controls would only be accessible via an autopilot box fitted with more anti-tamper measures than an XBox 360 and embedded in a cube of epoxy. You'd only be able select from it's list of pre-approved 'safe landing zones' and it'd do the rest. The law will be proposed within a month after the first case of a drunk flier crashing into a building. Within a week if a child is killed.

Re:Split shmit!

[Intropy]

Leaving aside all the political gobbledygook, I'm totally in for an automated personal flying car.

Re:Split shmit!

[SuricouRaven]

It'd revolutionise transport, yes. A good thing, assuming it's no more energy-hungry than existing cars. But the dream of a flying car you can really fly, free to cruise the skies, to go wherever you please... out of the question.

Re:Split shmit!

[crutchy]

i think you're ejecting orbitons out of your bottom

Re:Split shmit!

[Lehk228]

and that is a good thing, think of how awful drivers are on a 2D surface

Re:Split shmit!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean "spinning shit"?

Re:Split shmit!

[Anonymous Coward]

You ever think that maybe there is some serious danger in technology we haven't invented yet that every sentient race accidentally "trips into" at some point and that is what the answer is? I don't REALLY think this is the reason, but sometimes my mind starts playing tricks on me because of this (hmmm...there are black holes in the center of galaxies, and the stars in the center of galaxies might be older so might have evolved intelligent life sooner, who then invented doomsday tech and killed themselves... nah too paranoid, back to reading Slashdot!)

Re:Split shmit!

[Surt]

It's certainly a possibility. The cost of killing most of the people on one planet is coming down a lot faster than the rate at which we are adding new planets to live on. We'll soon reach the point where a well funded terrorist could bring down an asteroid and wipe out western civilization (and most of the rest, but I think evidence suggests they'd consider that a victory scenario).

I'm sure there are other hazards ahead of us as well. But if there were some technology thing that would accidentally kill us all (rather than intentionally) it seems likely we'd be able to see that happening in the universe.

Re:Split shmit!

[geekoid]

YO seriously underestimate the size of the universe.

IF a civilization could travel at 100 time the speed of light, they would only scratch a tiny bit of the universe before that civilization died out.

Plus you assume that because someone else didn't discover something, that there is nothing to discover.
Which is an attitude parent have used to squash children dreams for generations.

Re:Split shmit!

[Surt]

I think you're underestimating the size of the galaxy. At 100x the speed of light it takes only one advanced race to fill it up quite rapidly. And then the same goes for each other galaxy, plus you'd be seeing quite a few species make it to additional galaxies by now. A civilization doesn't have to last that long, just the technological capability of the species. A species only 10 times as mature as ours would have had plenty of time to reach additional galaxies by now, and there's plenty of room for species as much as 1000 times as mature.

Re:Split shmit!

[ImprovOmega]

On the other hand, there is a small, but measurable, chance that we're the most mature species in the galaxy. Maybe we're on track to fill it up while some other poor buggers are just now starting to make stone tools and we'll show up just as they start their first atomic bomb tests or something.

I mean, people look at it as some advanced civilization will come and wipe out our poor primitive selves, but someone had to be first, and maybe that's us. I mean, why not?

Re:Split shmit!

[Surt]

Sure, statistical chance is one possible explanation. Someone does have to be first. But to say that the chance is small is underselling it ... it is remotely tiny. The 'first' civilization should have been multiple billions of years ago. That we'd get this 'lucky' is so close to impossible that we have the whole 'Fermi paradox' name for it.

Re:Split shmit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, statistical chance is one possible explanation. Someone does have to be first. But to say that the chance is small is underselling it ... it is remotely tiny.

but what is the value of pWe_Are_First given that we have seen no evidence to the contrary?

Re:Split shmit!

[Surt]

That's the whole question behind the fermi paradox. If pWe_Are_First should be small, yet we seem to be first, are we wrong about the probability, about the being first, or are we incomprehensibly lucky?

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[Y.A.A.P.]

I believe you're over-thinking the one-dimensional attribute. It simply means they're using a straight-line chain of the molecules in question. There are no molecules in the construct branching off at any other angle, that's all.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[mug funky]

i have trouble understanding politicians too.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[Anonymous Coward]

All I know I know is that they are NOT FUNNY.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[mwvdlee]

All you have to do is just become a particle physicist yourself, discover a completely new set of even smaller particles and you can setup any IUPAC-like standardized naming convention you want for those. For the current particles, it's probably best to keep using the current standardized names.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[Svartormr]

There's a good one in a previous comment thread above here.

What would the Megatron be?

[craznar]

I think the 'heaviest' particle should be deemed the Megatron, in keeping with the WTFatron naming convention.

Re:What would the Megatron be?

[craznar]

Damn - a transformer got in the way of my post.

That should be Megaton and WTFaton ...

Re:What would the Megatron be?

[zippo01]

I tried to email you, but your email address doesn't appear to divisible by 8. Fail.

Re:What would the Megatron be?

[f3rret]

"megaton" - 10^6 tons. != particle

Re:What would the Megatron be?

[turkeyfeathers]

And the most 'evil' particle should be the Hitleron, in keeping with Godwin's Rule.

There is a fourth fundamental particle...

[Anonymous Coward]

..it is called a "holdon".

As in; hold on, we better check these results again.

Re:There is a fourth fundamental particle...

[Anonymous Coward]

I see nothing wrong with these result. And don't call me Holdon.

Re:There is a fourth fundamental particle...

[tomhath]

Get a grip on yourself.

Re:There is a fourth fundamental particle...

[Anonymous Coward]

Holdon Caulfield

Re:There is a fourth fundamental particle...

[eriqk]

No, for that you'd need a gripon.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are not that many, and there isn't a good systematic way to name them anyway. The root of the word denotes the basic property that describes the particle.

'holon' comes from 'hole', which is the absence of a particle. that may sound weird, but in quantum mechanics, everything is discrete so a particle present or absent is like a binary 1 or 0, and the 0 states (holes) are just as good as 1 states (particles).

'spinon' comes from 'spin', which is the intrinsic angular momentum.

'orbiton' comes from 'orbital', which is the agular momentum from the orbital motition around the nuclei.

There are lots of other quasi-particles that occur in condensed matter, pasmons, phonons, polarons, polaritons, and so on. They all arise as emergent effects from interactions between large numbers of 'fundamental' particles, such as electrons.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a long chain of molecules, so that the electrons jump from orbiting one molecule to another along a 1D path.

A Mott Insulator is an insulator (ie it doesn't conduct electricity), but one that is caused by interactions between electrons. In an ordinary insulator (a 'band insulator') doesnt conduct electricity because there are simply no available orbital states for the electrons to move into. Imagine a series of boxes, with electrons as balls moving from one box to another. In a band insulator the boxes are full, so you simply can't move the balls around. In a Mott insulator however, the boxes are plenty big enough but the interactions between the electrons (balls) are strong enough that you can't put more than one ball in each box. So you end up with one ball per box and nothing can move.

If you think you understand the world of 10^(-22)m

[Tenebrousedge]

Give a short, complete, accurate answer to this question: what is a particle?

If you must be ignorant, keep an open mind. Outside of the scale that human senses are designed to appreciate, extrapolation from experience tends not to be very useful.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[mathfeel]

I believe you're over-thinking the one-dimensional attribute. It simply means they're using a straight-line chain of the molecules in question. There are no molecules in the construct branching off at any other angle, that's all.

Charge-spin separation and spin-orbital separation are specifically effect of electron collective behavior in one-dimension: that is when the motion of electron is constrained to have one degree of freedom. Think of a single-lane road in which lane change is forbidden.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[crutchy]

We need an IUPAC-like standardized naming convention for these particles

star trek?

hunh?

[symbolset]

These physicists need to back off the horny goat wee.

Re:hunh?

[Roachie]

Dr Freud, phone call, line sex, er, I mean six, Dr Freud - line six.

Re:Unicorn ponies

[Anonymous Coward]

ILL TAKE TWO!

WHY IS THIS MODDED TROLL?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Honestly not the same AC): WTF is up with you mods? Snarxiv is hardly a troll website, and neither is pointing it out in this context. (Hint: It was made by a HEP theory researcher, poking a bit of fun at his own field -- it's the kind of thing Human Beings like to do sometimes...)

Re:WHY IS THIS MODDED TROLL?

[Khyber]

It's modded troll because the people with moderator points are fucking morons.

You needed any other explanation?

Re:WHY IS THIS MODDED TROLL?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's indeed my understanding also. The question was rhetorical.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it weird that when the word dimension is being used correctly (as it is the case here), folks switch off from the "technobabble".

Re:If you think you understand the world of 10^(-2

[indre1]

Only the likes of Sheldon Cooper with superior intellect to the others' may understand this.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Sponge Bath]

Physicists should use the D&D alignment and class system to assign particle names. Muon neutrino becomes neutral evil cleric, Up quark is lawful good fighter, etc.

Re:Unicorn ponies

[LeadSongDog]

I have unicorn ponies for sale. Males only, 9-12 hands in blue, pink and rainbow. Some have been ridden but most not. Horns are as-found. Pls reply at the usual email for the sale and delivery info.

ILL TAKE TWO!

If regular unicorns fart rainbows, do gay unicorn ponies fart plaid? Inquiring minds want to know!

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Anonymous Coward]

hardon

Re:If you think you understand the world of 10^(-2

[Anonymous Coward]

A particle is a quantized pointlike topological discontinuity of the gauge boson fields, whose location is characterized by a complex-valued density distribution that may change over time only in compliance with certain conservation laws associated with the symmetries of the vacuum.

Re:Unicorn ponies

[bughunter]

If regular unicorns fart rainbows, do gay unicorn ponies fart plaid?

Bloody santorum, I would imagine... or am I being too literal here?

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, instead of descriptive names like "spinon" and "orbiton", they should have totally arbitrary names like "Antimony", 'Cobalt", "Bromine", and "Arsenic" or should be named after people like "Rutherfordium" and "Einsteinium".

My sandwich could help the development of quantum

[Darth Snowshoe]

I'm sorry, but every little half-understood news blurb regarding particle or condensed matter physics, or spintronics or lasers or topological insulators or what-ever, "could also aid the quest to build a quantum computer". That's a total blarney. Could we just admit that we don't really know an practicable way to build a useful quantum computer yet, and leave it at that?

silly video game names

[Thud457]

damn, I got excited when I first misread that as Physicists detect elusive orbitron .

Re:If you think you understand the world of 10^(-2

[Dyinobal]

I can't watch the big bang theory. If Sheldon was so smart there is no way he could be a proponent of string theory.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[FatdogHaiku]

Shouldn't they have renamed the electron the "hardon" because it is so difficult to split into smaller components?

So where

[rossdee]

Where does the charge go?

team Preston Preston

[Thud457]

Man, I remember when everything from Austrailia used to be cool .
Then that movie ruined everything. Forever.

Re:Unicorn ponies

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll need to inspect them to assure that they are well-hung before accepting delivery.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Gilmoure]

Yeah but soon you have hemi-demi-semi-quiver neutral ++good archers and such.

Re:Unicorn ponies

[Anonymous Coward]

I have unicorn ponies for sale. Males only, 9-12 hands in blue, pink and rainbow. Some have been ridden but most not. Horns are as-found. Pls reply at the usual email for the sale and delivery info.

I've got some female unicorn ponies. Couple of Pegasi and earth ponies too. Here ya go!

"Particle Man, Particle Man,
doing the things a particle can.
What's he like, it's not important,
Particle Man..."

- It's Slashdot, we like any excuse to play some TMBG!

Anyways, back to physics class (one guy doing classical mechanics in high school, and some other guy doing an intro to nucleosynthesis.)

Do you have a hadron for particle physics?

[tepples]

Shouldn't they have renamed the electron the "hardon" because it is so difficult to split into smaller components?

They called the atom itself an "atom" because it was considered hard to split (from the Greek: a- = not; tom = split). Since the atom was split, two of the particles inside an atom was itself called the hadron, from the Greek word for "thick". The resemblance between "hadron" and a slang term for something else that gets "thick" led to all sorts of dick jokes in comments to news articles about the LHC.

Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

As good as a monkey

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Teancum]

The original names for quarks were based upon a poem by James Joyce. There are some other rather esoteric names that have come up in science over the years so such references really aren't totally unheard of.

not crack

[schlachter]

I'm not sure about crack cocaine...but I've heard that they use these colliders to generate a significant amount of speed.

Re:If you think you understand the world of 10^(-2

[geekoid]

You have no clue what you are talking about, and you know it. for proof I present a post you made in this very thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2796089&cid=39731421

PLesae..please shut up about thing you don't know anything about.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope that you are not a sysadmin with a say in server naming.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in the UK we call a natural mott insulator a muff; the artificial variety is known as a merkin.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[stepho-wrs]

And understanding the difference is a hairy problem.

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[kava_kicks]

I would have given you points for this if you hadn't posted AC ;)

Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO

[kava_kicks]

Thanks.

Re:Lord, Jewsus!

[wallsg]

When I saw "orbiton" the first thing that popped into my mind was "armitron". I have one stuck in a closet somewhere.