Physicists Detect Elusive Orbiton By "Splitting" Electron 131
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."
Fantasy (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Play snarxiv versus arxiv: http://snarxiv.org/ [snarxiv.org] , where computer generated article titles compete with real ones.
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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.
WHY IS THIS MODDED TROLL? (Score:1, Interesting)
(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...)
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It's modded troll because the people with moderator points are fucking morons.
You needed any other explanation?
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Man how am I even supposed to take chemistry or physics classes you guys. I cannot draw dots this tiny! PLEASE STOP DISCOVERING SHIT!
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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.
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Cocaine? Nah, it has to be lsd that they synthesised.
Nah, I can't be synthesised, nor even synthesized.
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not crack (Score:3)
I'm not sure about crack cocaine...but I've heard that they use these colliders to generate a significant amount of speed.
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How about bring up something interesting like how Mott insulators [...] are themselves interesting materials
What? You think crack cocaine isn't interesting material?
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How about bring up something interesting like how
much of a knobhead you are. Now that would be fucking hilarious.
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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.)
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Problem is that he agrees that the "me" in that statement /would/ be the most important part.
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You must be new here..
Sigh (Score:2)
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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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Shouldn't there be a particle for height, width, depth?
Well, we already have up & down quarks.
If you think you understand the world of 10^(-22)m (Score:3)
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.
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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 [slashdot.org]
PLesae..please shut up about thing you don't know anything about.
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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
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunatly, they didn't select my submission [slashdot.org], 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...
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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 elemen
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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?
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But if they didn't actually split a particle the article is misleading.
Why can't scientists review their press coverage?
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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 [wikipedia.org].
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Another example of quasi-particles are phonons [wikipedia.org]. 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, whic
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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.
What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO3? (Score:1)
Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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i have trouble understanding politicians too.
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All I know I know is that they are NOT FUNNY [slashdot.org].
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Re:What is a one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr2CuO (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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team Preston Preston (Score:2)
Then that movie [wordpress.com] ruined everything. Forever.
Re:Split shmit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about the laser [wikipedia.org]. 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?
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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
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Leaving aside all the political gobbledygook, I'm totally in for an automated personal flying car.
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What would the Megatron be? (Score:2)
I think the 'heaviest' particle should be deemed the Megatron, in keeping with the WTFatron naming convention.
Re:What would the Megatron be? (Score:4, Funny)
Damn - a transformer got in the way of my post.
That should be Megaton and WTFaton ...
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"megaton" - 10^6 tons. != particle
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There is a fourth fundamental particle... (Score:4, Funny)
..it is called a "holdon".
As in; hold on, we better check these results again.
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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!
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If regular unicorns fart rainbows, do gay unicorn ponies fart plaid?
Bloody santorum, I would imagine... or am I being too literal here?
hunh? (Score:1)
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My sandwich could help the development of quantum (Score:1)
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?
So where (Score:2)
Where does the charge go?
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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:Lord, Jewsus! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Yeah but soon you have hemi-demi-semi-quiver neutral ++good archers and such.
Re:Lord, Jewsus! (Score:4, Informative)
The original names for quarks were based upon a poem by James Joyce [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:Lord, Jewsus! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Do you have a hadron for particle physics? (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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 [largehardoncollider.com] in comments to news articles about the LHC.
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When I saw "orbiton" the first thing that popped into my mind was "armitron [wikipedia.org]". I have one stuck in a closet somewhere.
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We need an IUPAC-like standardized naming convention for these particles
star trek?
silly video game names (Score:2)