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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Reddit.
I'm serious. If you search for the discussion about the news article on a right subreddit, or HN, or spelunk Twitter enough, there's a good chance you'll find a domain expert - sometimes even the paper's author themselves, or someone who works with them - explaining the science correctly and/or pointing out the bullshit in the press report.
(I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient if scientists were writing press releases themselves, and the journalists/PR people would be chasing grants for them instead. It seems like a better match for their individual skills anyway.)
>I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient if scientists were writing press releases themselves
Agree, and I think everyone here has experienced the phenomenon where someone on reddit/HN/twitter has explained something far better than a media outlet. The thing to keep in mind when trying to understand this is that absolutely __everyone__ responds to incentives. With a news organization, no matter what that organization is or their goals, the chief incentive is readership, not accuracy or anything else. Not saying that the writers are anything other than well intentioned and honest or that they don't care deeply about the truth, but the reality of mortal existence is to maximize behaviors that you believe benefit you.
A news org is benefited by people reading what they say, not by being right. Reddit/twitter/HN often is a better source of truth because people often post because they have a desire to be heard, be understood, share information, tell the truth or some other reason that does not involve selling ads against you reading what they say.
> Agree, and I think everyone here has experienced the phenomenon where someone on reddit/HN/twitter has explained something far better than a media outlet.
I've experienced the opposite, though, too.
Posts with thousands upon thousands of upvotes and a little comment with a dozen saying "this is entirely wrong, and here's a bunch of proof, and here's an expert explaining it properly".
That's not really the opposite. That comment with the correction is a part of the submission that's being upvoted.
I do this myself, too: if the discussion underneath a HN submission rescues an otherwise bad article, or even develops into a completely unrelated but interesting tangent, I'll happily upvote it. Sometimes the only value of the submitted article is in the discussion it starts - but that still makes the particular submission valuable.
> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
I think this is the same argument made by Veritasium - poorly summarized: do whatever it takes to hook people in that have never heard the topic before, then teach them something new.
https://youtu.be/S2xHZPH5Sng
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.
“ 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.”
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!
> If you were standing at arm's length from someone and each of you had one percent more electrons than protons[[0]]
The latent energy of electromagnetic repulsion between the two of you (never mind between the parts of each of your bodies) would be a bit more than ((1%*80kg/2amu*electroncharge)^2 coulombconst / meter), or on the order of a megaton. Not megaton tnt, a megaton of just energy (comparable to a million tons of antimatter).
Not really. “only”, no. Trying to levitate trains with static charge would introduce all kinds of hard problems, some easy to imagine, some probably would take a lot of engineering to discover.
The electric field would be hard to contain just under the train, the charge would really really try hard to find somewhere else to be, there would be some crazy ionization of the air going on… flying a kite in a thunderstorm would probably be quite safe by comparison to being close to such an apparatus.
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.?
Duh, ucks, how did miss that? Thanks for that, I've now corrected it. It's what happens when posting from a phone whilst on the move. Most timely correction too, if I'd reread it tomorrow when too late to correct it then I would really have been fazed! Here's an upvote. :-)
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.
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).
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.
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.
Given that the stacking of spheres is built from a stack of planar layers, wouldn't that mean that the stack is prone to shearing forces, sliding the layers over each other?
Wouldn't a packing that is irregular in all directions be more robust?
In the "bestagons" video, it is explained that the hexagons win because there are no straight lines in the packing, but I'd expect these to correspond to planes in the 3d case.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
