{"id":123770,"date":"2021-06-13T17:23:18","date_gmt":"2021-06-14T00:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/electrons-dual-nature-appears-in-a-quantum-spin-liquid"},"modified":"2021-06-13T17:23:18","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T00:23:18","slug":"electrons-dual-nature-appears-in-a-quantum-spin-liquid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/electrons-dual-nature-appears-in-a-quantum-spin-liquid","title":{"rendered":"Electrons dual nature appears in a quantum spin liquid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/electrons-dual-nature-appears-in-a-quantum-spin-liquid.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><i>Physics World<\/i><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Quantum mechanics describes this frustration by suggesting that the orientation of the spins is not rigid. Instead, it constantly changes direction in a fluid-like way to produce an entangled ensemble of spin-ups and spin-downs. Thanks to this behaviour, a spin liquid will remain in a liquid state even at temperatures near absolute zero, where most materials usually freeze solid.<\/p>\n<p><b>The holon and the spinon<\/b><\/p>\n<p>To describe this behaviour in mathematical terms, the late Nobel laureate Philip W Anderson, who predicted the existence of spin liquids in 1973, proposed that in the quantum regime, an electron might in fact be composed of two distinct particles. The first, known as a \u201cholon\u201d, would bear the electron\u2019s negative charge, while the second \u201cspinon\u201d particle would carry its spin. Anderson later suggested that this spin-charge separation might provide a microscopic mechanism to explain the high superconducting transition temperatures (T<sub>c<\/sub>) that were observed in copper oxides, or cuprates, beginning in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physics World Quantum mechanics describes this frustration by suggesting that the orientation of the spins is not rigid. Instead, it constantly changes direction in a fluid-like way to produce an entangled ensemble of spin-ups and spin-downs. Thanks to this behaviour, a spin liquid will remain in a liquid state even at temperatures near absolute zero, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}