Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Damn - a transformer got in the way of my post.
That should be Megaton and WTFaton ...
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
..it is called a "holdon".
As in; hold on, we better check these results again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
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.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
it's a marketing term
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.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Only the likes of Sheldon Cooper with superior intellect to the others' may understand this.
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.
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.
I can see the fnords!
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.
Shouldn't they have renamed the electron the "hardon" because it is so difficult to split into smaller components?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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...
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.
I'm not sure about crack cocaine...but I've heard that they use these colliders to generate a significant amount of speed.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
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?