{"id":124583,"date":"2021-07-04T05:22:48","date_gmt":"2021-07-04T12:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/a-crystal-made-of-electrons"},"modified":"2021-07-04T05:22:48","modified_gmt":"2021-07-04T12:22:48","slug":"a-crystal-made-of-electrons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/a-crystal-made-of-electrons","title":{"rendered":"A crystal made of electrons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-crystal-made-of-electrons.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in observing a crystal that consists only of electrons. Such Wigner crystals were already predicted almost ninety years ago but could only now be observed directly in a semiconductor material.<\/p>\n<p>Crystals have fascinated people through the ages. Who hasn\u2019t admired the complex patterns of a snowflake at some point, or the perfectly symmetrical surfaces of a rock crystal? The magic doesn\u2019t stop even if one knows that all this results from a simple interplay of attraction and repulsion between atoms and electrons. A team of researchers led by Ata\u00e7 Imamo\u011flu, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, have now produced a very special crystal. Unlike normal crystals, it consists exclusively of electrons. In doing so, they have confirmed a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/theoretical+prediction\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">theoretical prediction<\/a> that was made almost ninety years ago and which has since been regarded as a kind of holy grail of condensed matter physics. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in observing a crystal that consists only of electrons. Such Wigner crystals were already predicted almost ninety years ago but could only now be observed directly in a semiconductor material. Crystals have fascinated people through the ages. Who hasn\u2019t admired the complex patterns of a snowflake at some point, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124583","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}