Friday 20 April 2012

Hello orbiton!

Remarkable!!! physicists have now managed to detect the elusive third constituent of an electron — its 'orbiton'. The research could help to resolve a long-standing mystery about the origin of high-temperature superconductivity as well aid in the construction of quantum computers!!! "The team created the quasiparticles by firing a beam of X-ray photons at a single electron in a one-dimensional sample of strontium cuprate. The beam excited the electron to a higher orbital, causing the beam to lose a fraction of its energy in the process, then rebounded. The team measured the number of scattered photons in the rebounding beam, along with their energy and momentum, and compared this with computer simulations of the beam's properties. The researchers found that when the photons' energy loss was between about 1.5 and 3.5 electronvolts, the beam's spectrum matched their predictions for the case in which an orbiton and spinon had been created and were moving in opposite directions through the material.
“The next step will be to produce the holon, the spinon and the orbiton at the same time,” says van den Brink.
Andrew Boothroyd, a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, commends the team’s technological prowess. “To detect this, they picked out a shift in the beam energy of about one part in a million, which is very difficult,” he says." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10974.html ... also see: http://www.nature.com/news/not-quite-so-elementary-my-dear-electron-1.10471?WT.mc_id=FBK_NPG

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