* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Author Richard Russo Will Speak At Sandwich Town Hall – CapeNews.net

    Join Us for an Inspiring Evening with Author Richard Russo at Sandwich Town Hall!

    Entertainment Partners Acquires CASHét, Digital Payments Vendor for Productions – Variety

    Entertainment Partners Acquires CASHét, Digital Payments Vendor for Productions – Variety

    Salem’s Harborwalk Garden Cultivates Community with Entertainment, Food, and Events – 105.7 WROR

    Discover the Vibrant Community Spirit at Salem’s Harborwalk Garden: A Hub for Entertainment, Food, and Fun!

    Entertainment-Focused Narrative and Culture Change Practice – New America

    Transforming Culture Through Engaging Entertainment Narratives

    Rising stars: Young classical musicians surging on social media – Yahoo

    Meet the Next Generation of Classical Music Sensations Making Waves on Social Media!

    Devin Harjes Dies: ‘Manifest’ & ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Actor Was 41 – WyomingNews.com

    Tragic Loss: Devin Harjes, Star of ‘Manifest’ and ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ Passes Away at 41

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Inside the tedious effort to tally AI’s energy appetite – MIT Technology Review

    Inside the tedious effort to tally AI’s energy appetite – MIT Technology Review

    Finland Set to Lead EU Quantum Technology Defense Project – IoT World Today

    Finland Set to Lead EU Quantum Technology Defense Project – IoT World Today

    AI for lawyers: Win back your time using technology – nationaljurist.com

    Reclaim Your Time: How AI is Transforming the Legal Profession

    Prosecutors accuse men of exporting U.S. military technology to China – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

    Men Charged with Illegally Exporting U.S. Military Technology to China

    ROLAND’S NEW WIRELESS TRIGGER TECHNOLOGY, PORTER & DAVIES ON TOUR, NEW 64 AUDIO ASPIRE UNIVERSAL IEM MODELS, WAVES FREE PLUGIN PACK – Modern Drummer Magazine

    ROLAND’S NEW WIRELESS TRIGGER TECHNOLOGY, PORTER & DAVIES ON TOUR, NEW 64 AUDIO ASPIRE UNIVERSAL IEM MODELS, WAVES FREE PLUGIN PACK – Modern Drummer Magazine

    This giant microwave may change the future of war – MIT Technology Review

    Revolutionizing Warfare: The Impact of a Game-Changing Giant Microwave

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Author Richard Russo Will Speak At Sandwich Town Hall – CapeNews.net

    Join Us for an Inspiring Evening with Author Richard Russo at Sandwich Town Hall!

    Entertainment Partners Acquires CASHét, Digital Payments Vendor for Productions – Variety

    Entertainment Partners Acquires CASHét, Digital Payments Vendor for Productions – Variety

    Salem’s Harborwalk Garden Cultivates Community with Entertainment, Food, and Events – 105.7 WROR

    Discover the Vibrant Community Spirit at Salem’s Harborwalk Garden: A Hub for Entertainment, Food, and Fun!

    Entertainment-Focused Narrative and Culture Change Practice – New America

    Transforming Culture Through Engaging Entertainment Narratives

    Rising stars: Young classical musicians surging on social media – Yahoo

    Meet the Next Generation of Classical Music Sensations Making Waves on Social Media!

    Devin Harjes Dies: ‘Manifest’ & ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Actor Was 41 – WyomingNews.com

    Tragic Loss: Devin Harjes, Star of ‘Manifest’ and ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ Passes Away at 41

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Inside the tedious effort to tally AI’s energy appetite – MIT Technology Review

    Inside the tedious effort to tally AI’s energy appetite – MIT Technology Review

    Finland Set to Lead EU Quantum Technology Defense Project – IoT World Today

    Finland Set to Lead EU Quantum Technology Defense Project – IoT World Today

    AI for lawyers: Win back your time using technology – nationaljurist.com

    Reclaim Your Time: How AI is Transforming the Legal Profession

    Prosecutors accuse men of exporting U.S. military technology to China – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

    Men Charged with Illegally Exporting U.S. Military Technology to China

    ROLAND’S NEW WIRELESS TRIGGER TECHNOLOGY, PORTER & DAVIES ON TOUR, NEW 64 AUDIO ASPIRE UNIVERSAL IEM MODELS, WAVES FREE PLUGIN PACK – Modern Drummer Magazine

    ROLAND’S NEW WIRELESS TRIGGER TECHNOLOGY, PORTER & DAVIES ON TOUR, NEW 64 AUDIO ASPIRE UNIVERSAL IEM MODELS, WAVES FREE PLUGIN PACK – Modern Drummer Magazine

    This giant microwave may change the future of war – MIT Technology Review

    Revolutionizing Warfare: The Impact of a Game-Changing Giant Microwave

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home Science

Quantum crystal of frozen electrons—the Wigner crystal—is visualized for the first time

April 10, 2024
in Science
Quantum crystal of frozen electrons—the Wigner crystal—is visualized for the first time
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Quantum crystal of frozen electrons—the Wigner crystal—is visualized for the first time

An image of a triangular Wigner crystal taken by scanning tunneling microscope. Researchers have unveiled an elusive crystal that is formed purely from the repulsive nature of electrons. Each site (blue circular region) contains a single localized electron. Image by Yen-Chen Tsui and team, Princeton University. Credit: Yen-Chen Tsui, Princeton University

Electrons—the infinitesimally small particles that are known to zip around atoms—continue to amaze scientists despite the more than a century that scientists have studied them. Now, physicists at Princeton University have pushed the boundaries of our understanding of these minute particles by visualizing, for the first time, direct evidence for what is known as the Wigner crystal—a strange kind of matter that is made entirely of electrons.

The finding, published in Nature, confirms a 90-year-old theory that electrons can assemble into a crystal-like formation of their own, without the need to coalesce around atoms. The research could help lead to the discovery of new quantum phases of matter when electrons behave collectively.

“The Wigner crystal is one of the most fascinating quantum phases of matter that has been predicted and the subject of numerous studies claiming to have found, at best, indirect evidence for its formation,” said Al Yazdani, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Physics at Princeton University and the senior author of the study. “Visualizing this crystal allows us not only to watch its formation, confirming many of its properties, but we can also study it in ways you couldn’t in the past.”

In the 1930s, Eugene Wigner, a Princeton professor of physics and winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for his work in quantum symmetry principles, wrote a paper in which he proposed the then-revolutionary idea that interaction among electrons could lead to their spontaneous arrangement into a crystal-like configuration, or lattice, of closely packed electrons. This could only occur, he theorized, because of their mutual repulsion and under conditions of low densities and extremely cold temperatures.

“When you think of a crystal, you typically think of an attraction between atoms as a stabilizing force, but this crystal forms purely because of the repulsion between electrons,” said Yazdani, who is the inaugural co-director of the Princeton Quantum Institute and director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials.

For a long time, however, Wigner’s strange electron crystal remained in the realm of theory. It was not until a series of much later experiments that the concept of an electron crystal transformed from conjecture to reality. The first of these was conducted in the 1970s when scientists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey created a “classical” electron crystal by spraying electrons on the surface of helium and found that they responded in a rigid manner like a crystal.

However, the electrons in these experiments were very far apart and behaved more like individual particles than a cohesive structure. A true Wigner crystal, instead of following the familiar laws of physics in the everyday world, would follow the laws of quantum physics, in which the electrons would act not like individual particles but more like a single wave.

This led to a whole series of experiments over the next decades that proposed various ways to create quantum Wigner crystals. These experiments were greatly advanced in the 1980s and 1990s when physicists discovered how to confine electrons’ motion to atomically thin layers using semiconductors.

The application of a magnetic field to such layered structures also makes electrons move in a circle, creating favorable conditions for crystallization. However, these experiments were never able to observe the crystal directly. They were only able to suggest its existence or indirectly infer it from how electrons flow through the semiconductor.

The video describes the melting processes of an electron Wigner crystal into electron-liquid phases. Credit: Princeton University

“There are literally hundreds of scientific papers that study these effects and claim that the results must be due to the Wigner crystal,” Yazdani said, “but one can’t be sure because none of these experiments actually see the crystal.”

An equally important consideration, Yazdani noted, is that what some researchers think is evidence of a Wigner crystal could be the result of imperfections or other periodic structures inherent to the materials used in the experiments.

“If there are any imperfections or some form of periodic substructure in the material, it is possible to trap electrons and find experimental signatures that are not due to the formation of a self-organized ordered Wigner crystal itself, but due to electrons ‘stuck’ near an imperfection or trapped because of the material’s structure,” he said.

With these considerations in mind, Yazdani and his research team set about to see whether they could directly image the Wigner crystal using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a device that relies on a technique called “quantum tunneling” rather than light to view the atomic and subatomic world.

They also decided to use graphene, an amazing material that was discovered in the 21st century and has been used in many experiments involving novel quantum phenomena. To successfully conduct the experiment, however, the researchers had to make the graphene as pristine and as devoid of imperfections as possible. This was key to eliminating the possibility of any electron crystals forming because of material imperfections.

The results were impressive. “Our group has been able to make unprecedentedly clean samples that made this work possible,” Yazdani said. “With our microscope we can confirm that the samples are without any atomic imperfection in the graphene atomic lattice or foreign atoms on its surface over regions with hundreds of thousands of atoms.”

To make pure graphene, the researchers exfoliated two carbon sheets of graphene in a configuration that is called Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene (BLG). They then cooled the sample down to extremely low temperatures—just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero—and applied a magnetic field perpendicular to the sample, which created a two-dimensional electron gas system within the thin layers of graphene. With this, they could tune the density of the electrons between the two layers.

“In our experiment, we can image the system as we tune the number of electrons per unit area,” said Yen-Chen Tsui, a graduate student in physics and the first author of the paper. “Just by changing the density, you can initiate this phase transition and find electrons spontaneously form into an ordered crystal.”

This happens, Tsui explained, because at low densities, the electrons are far apart from each other—and they’re situated in a disordered, disorganized fashion. However, as you increase the density, which brings the electrons closer together, their natural repulsive tendencies kick in, and they start to form an organized lattice. Then, as you increase the density further, the crystalline phase will melt into an electron liquid.

Minhao He, a postdoctoral researcher and co-first author of the paper, explained this process in greater detail. “There is an inherent repulsion between the electrons,” he said. “They want to push each other away, but in the meantime, the electrons cannot be infinitely apart due to the finite density. The result is that they form a closely packed, regularized lattice structure, with each of the localized electron occupying a certain amount of space.”

When this transition formed, the researchers were able to visualize it using the STM. “Our work provides the first direct images of this crystal. We proved the crystal is really there, and we can see it,” said Tsui.

However, just visualizing the crystal wasn’t the end of the experiment. A concrete image of the crystal allowed them to distinguish some of the crystal’s characteristics. They discovered that the crystal is triangular in configuration and that it can be continuously tuned with the density of the particles. This led to the realization that the Wigner crystal is actually quite stable over a very long range, a conclusion that is contrary to what many scientists have surmised.

“By being able to tune its lattice constant continuously, the experiment proved that the crystal structure is the result of the pure repulsion between the electrons,” said Yazdani.

The researchers also discovered several other interesting phenomena that will no doubt warrant further investigation in the future. They found that the location to which each electron is localized in the lattice appears in the images with a certain amount of “blurring,” as if the location is not defined by a point but a range position in which the electrons are confined in the lattice. The paper described this as the “zero-point” motion of electrons, a phenomenon related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The extent of this blurriness reflects the quantum nature of the Wigner crystal.

“Electrons, even when frozen into a Wigner crystal, should exhibit strong zero-point motion,” said Yazdani. “It turns out this quantum motion covers a third of the distance between them, making the Wigner crystal a novel quantum crystal.”

Yazdani and his team are also examining how the Wigner crystal melts and transitions into other exotic liquid phases of interacting electrons in a magnetic field. The researchers hope to image these phases just as they have imaged the Wigner crystal.

More information:
Ali Yazdani, Direct observation of a magnetic-field-induced Wigner crystal, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07212-7. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07212-7

Journal information:
Nature

Citation:
Quantum crystal of frozen electrons—the Wigner crystal—is visualized for the first time (2024, April 10)
retrieved 10 April 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-04-quantum-crystal-frozen-electrons-wigner.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Phys.org – https://phys.org/news/2024-04-quantum-crystal-frozen-electrons-wigner.html

Tags: CrystalQuantumscience
Previous Post

New strategy for assessing the applicability of reactions

Next Post

Physicists discover a novel quantum state in an elemental solid

Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities – Nature

Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities – Nature

June 4, 2025
John Brenkus, ‘Sport Science’ Host, Died By Suicide, Medical Examiner Says – TMZ

Tragic Loss: ‘Sport Science’ Host John Brenkus Passes Away in Heartbreaking Circumstances

June 4, 2025
Meghan to take a break from As ever as she announces next step for those ‘wondering and waiting’ – Nine – Honey

Meghan to take a break from As ever as she announces next step for those ‘wondering and waiting’ – Nine – Honey

June 4, 2025
Aeternum Update 1.3.27 – newworld.com

Exciting New Features and Enhancements in Aeternum Update 1.3.27!

June 4, 2025
Larry Kudlow: Liberal media has been ‘completely wrong’ on the Trump economy – Fox Business

Larry Kudlow: Liberal media has been ‘completely wrong’ on the Trump economy – Fox Business

June 4, 2025
Author Richard Russo Will Speak At Sandwich Town Hall – CapeNews.net

Join Us for an Inspiring Evening with Author Richard Russo at Sandwich Town Hall!

June 4, 2025
Hochul, Jeffries raise concerns over possible impacts of One Big Beautiful Bill Act – Spectrum News

Hochul, Jeffries raise concerns over possible impacts of One Big Beautiful Bill Act – Spectrum News

June 4, 2025
Inside the tedious effort to tally AI’s energy appetite – MIT Technology Review

Inside the tedious effort to tally AI’s energy appetite – MIT Technology Review

June 4, 2025
Kehoe calls special session on storm damage, KC sports teams – FOX 2

Kehoe Announces Special Session to Address Storm Damage and Support KC Sports Teams

June 3, 2025
From Eggs To Fingerlings, Wyoming Students Dive Into The World Of Fish Conservation – KGAB

From Eggs to Fingerlings: Wyoming Students Make Waves in Fish Conservation!

June 3, 2025

Categories

Archives

June 2025
MTWTFSS
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30 
« May    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (664)
  • Economy (678)
  • Entertainment (21,584)
  • General (15,261)
  • Health (9,720)
  • Lifestyle (681)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (679)
  • Politics (687)
  • Science (15,898)
  • Sports (21,182)
  • Technology (15,664)
  • World (665)

Recent News

Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities – Nature

Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities – Nature

June 4, 2025
John Brenkus, ‘Sport Science’ Host, Died By Suicide, Medical Examiner Says – TMZ

Tragic Loss: ‘Sport Science’ Host John Brenkus Passes Away in Heartbreaking Circumstances

June 4, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version