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."
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.
Re:Fantasy (Score:5, Interesting)
Play snarxiv versus arxiv: http://snarxiv.org/ [snarxiv.org] , where computer generated article titles compete with real ones.
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.
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.
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...)