What a solid made of electrons looks like

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02657-6

by gmays • 5 years ago

164 69 5 years ago

ellyagg• 5 years ago

How hard would it be to make a crystal visible to the naked eye?

SCUSKU• 5 years ago

Can anyone explain to me what the implications of this achievement are? What properties does an electron crystal have? And what are its potential applications?

elil172• 5 years ago

As I understand it there are no known uses.

pdonis• 5 years ago

The phrase "a solid made of electrons" is rather misleading. It's just an ordinary solid (a semiconductor) in which the electrons are made to adopt a particular configuration that does not occur naturally. It is not a "solid" that is only composed of electrons, with no atomic nuclei present.

jerf• 5 years ago

Even science reporters are having a hard time keeping up with what materials science has been up to lately. With no disrespect to them really intended, they can just about keep up with the semiconductor world's concept of tracking "holes" rather than electrons, but it seems like going any farther into the quasiparticle world is just too much for them. It's rare to see an article that doesn't have some sort of verbiage that indicates the reporter doesn't really understanding what's going on, if indeed I've ever seen one at all.

jacobolus• 5 years ago

Are there any recent summaries by materials scientists written for laypeople?

xondono• 5 years ago

I really wonder how much is willful ignorance for the benefit of clickbait

karaterobot• 5 years ago

I get that it's hard.

Often, I'll read a science article in a blog, or local newspaper, or general-interest magazine. I'll see something obviously incorrect, and say "well, it's not a science outlet, they can't be expected to know the science that well, and they're just explaining it to lay people anyway, so it's good enough. I'll double check this with a reliable science news source."

But you'd think if anyone could get it right, and trust their readers to care about them getting it right, it would be Nature! If Nature is going to start going to lower their standards to go after clicks, I dunno what reliable source I'm supposed to double check things with.

OJFord2• 5 years ago

In undeserved fairness, I think it's 'just' a clickbait headline, and the author does have a better understanding than you suggest.

The article quickly explains (even the caption on the lead image) that it's an arrangement within a normal solid sheet.

I don't really understand in what sense the internal electron arrangement is 'a solid', but hey, as clickbait, it worked.

xxpor• 5 years ago

My first reaction to the headline was "I wonder how many teslas the magnets they're using to keep it together are?"

colechristensen2• 5 years ago

It’s essentially impossible to make an electron-only substance. The highest density normal-matter stars (white dwarfs) are kept from collapsing with the force of electric repulsion in atoms and they do collapse by proton-electron collision and conversion into neutrons.

From Feynman:

If you were standing at arm’s length from someone and each of you had one percent more electrons than protons, the repelling force would be incredible. How great? Enough to lift the Empire State Building? No! To lift Mount Everest? No! The repulsion would be enough to lift a “weight” equal to that of the entire earth!

gfody• 5 years ago

so _not_ the strong-interaction material from 3bp? damn

lisper• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28469275

Koshkin2• 5 years ago

I think the confusion may be the result of a chain of vague associations (or, perhaps, of the "broken telephone effect"): "adopt a particular configuration" -> regular spatial arrangement -> crystal lattice -> crystal-like -> crystal -> solid.

Pulcinella• 5 years ago

Solvated electrons are kind of liquid electrons in that they are a liquid and the anion is just a free electron instead of bound to something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvated_electron

They can be used to, among other things, reduce pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine.

ddingus• 5 years ago

Thanks for that!

I read the piece, saw the headline and was immediately confused: Like we can have matter that is ELECTRONS only?

crispyambulance• 5 years ago

The first paragraph of the article clearly describes what the title is actually getting at. It's a perfectly fine title that catches interest.

   If the conditions are just right, some of the electrons inside a material will arrange themselves into a tidy honeycomb pattern — like a solid within a solid. Physicists have now directly imaged these ‘Wigner crystals’, named after the Hungarian-born theorist Eugene Wigner, who first imagined them almost 90 years ago.

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

A solid made of electrons would wreak lots of havoc. Probably worse than solid made of antimatter.

hilbert422• 5 years ago

Right, that headline had me a bit fazed too. I envisioned a sort of 'crystal' of electrons packed together like people in a tightly packed elevator or oranges in a box.

My mind boggles, if electrons were packed like this then we'd need conditions somewhere between those of a neutron star and a black hole singularity I'd imagine.

Does anyone have any concept of what such matter would look like - its properties, etc.?

grok22• 5 years ago

phased => fazed? https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/phase-vs-faze; sorry off-topic

zardo• 5 years ago

Does anyone have any concept of what such matter would look like - its properties, etc.?

It would have a lot of charge.

oceanplexian• 5 years ago

The phrase "a solid made of electrons" is rather misleading

You've just crushed my dreams of experiencing a Star Trek holodeck or replicator based on this technology.

pixl97• 5 years ago

Electron moon looks like the end of the universe

https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/

crazydoggers2• 5 years ago

It is a solid, and your description isn’t really accurate. It’s not the semiconductor that is being imaged.

The semiconductors are being used to generate a contained cloud of electrons, basically a gas of electrons between the semiconductors.

That gas is then cooled until it crystallizes.

So what you are seeing is a layer of crystallized electrons.

It is not a "solid" that is only composed of electrons, with no atomic nuclei present.

That is indeed what it is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner_crystal

From Wikipedia:

“ A Wigner crystal is the solid (crystalline) phase of electrons first predicted by Eugene Wigner in 1934. A gas of electrons moving in 2D or 3D in a uniform, inert, neutralizing background will crystallize and form a lattice if the electron density is less than a critical value.”

theophrastus• 5 years ago

So this results in a single wavefunction constrained to a particular space group[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group

adrian_b• 5 years ago

Link to the original article in Arxiv:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10599

ionwake• 5 years ago

I saw no photo on mobile or is that just me ?

qwertox• 5 years ago

Visible on mobile, a blue photo. Works in full browser as well as in a WebView.

rvieira• 5 years ago

I find materials science fascinating. Is there any recommendation of a blog on this topic for laypeople?

9wzYQbTYsAIc• 5 years ago

Mandatory reminder that hexagons are the bestagons.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY

amelius2• 5 years ago

How does that generalize to three dimensions?

LeifCarrotson2• 5 years ago

As a Hexagonal Close Packing lattice, which is the correct way to represent the maximum density arrangement of equal spheres.

If you've seen a stack of spheres, with the bottom layer in rows offset by one radius such that each sphere touches six others at the same height, and the next layer nestled in the intersections of this bottom layer, that's a hexagonal close packing.

Also, the "hexagons are the bestagons" attitude generalizes to three dimensions by dismissing face-centered cubic packing as an inferior way to look at the arrangement.

To generalize the Youtube video aspect, see also this Matt Parker/Steve Mould video on spherical packing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3inLMXcetUA

latchkey• 5 years ago

I can only imagine the excitement in the room after running the same experiment with the graphene layer on top and seeing this result. I bet it was huge hi-fives!

jordanpg• 5 years ago

Just take care not to touch it…

fallingfrog• 5 years ago

I imagine a solid made only of electrons would in fact be a bomb, and an absurdly powerful one too. More powerful than a thermonuclear warhead pound for pound, by a big margin.

Koshkin2• 5 years ago

Unless there's too many of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_matter

ahmedfromtunis2• 5 years ago

The title is so clickbaity that it became anti-clickbait (aclickbaity?): I clicked not to learn how this is even possible, but to find out what the eventual catch was.

A better title would be: Here's the first photo ever of a layer of pure electrons. Still click-attracting, yet factually correct (as far as I understand).

elil172• 5 years ago

I don’t see how that’s not an accurate title. Graphene is a solid and it’s very thin.

ahmedfromtunis2• 5 years ago

Graphene sure is a solid, but it's made out of atoms. However, the thin layer of electrons wedged between the the other parts of the atoms does *not*, to my knowledge, constitute a solid.

pininja2• 5 years ago

Is their “scanning tunnelling microscope” similar to a atomic force microscope [0]? It also drags a probe over the surface so I’m wondering if they are in the same family.

[0] https://youtu.be/2Kv6KwADn7Q

hexane360• 5 years ago

They're similar. However, an AFM directly measures the deflection of a probe you're rastering, while a STM measures the current caused by quantum tunneling between the probe and the sample. This is extremely sensitive to height because an electron's wavefunction degrades as e^(-sqrt(2*m_e*E)*x/hbar) with distance x and energy barrier E (the measured current will scale with the wavefunction^2). Additionally, a STM allows you to probe electron states as well as just topography.

davesque• 5 years ago

How is the solidity of ordinary matter not already constituted more or less entirely by electrons and their behavior towards one another?

jaChEWAg• 5 years ago

Surely, I can't be the only one who clicked on this thinking it's related to the Electron framework rather than scientific electrons

smolder• 5 years ago

Blame the awful trend of lazy, ambiguous software naming

EamonnMR• 5 years ago

Scifi concept: solid but low-mass beings with normal electrons but exotic nuclei.

What a solid made of electrons looks like

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