{"id":209635,"date":"2025-03-24T17:14:29","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T22:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/looking-for-elusive-quantum-particles-try-a-bad-metal-researchers-suggest"},"modified":"2025-03-24T17:14:29","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T22:14:29","slug":"looking-for-elusive-quantum-particles-try-a-bad-metal-researchers-suggest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/looking-for-elusive-quantum-particles-try-a-bad-metal-researchers-suggest","title":{"rendered":"Looking for elusive quantum particles? Try a bad metal, researchers suggest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/looking-for-elusive-quantum-particles-try-a-bad-metal-researchers-suggest2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Metals, as most know them, are good conductors of electricity. That\u2019s because the countless electrons in a metal like gold or silver move more or less freely from one atom to the next, their motion impeded only by occasional collisions with defects in the material.<\/p>\n<p>There are, however, metallic materials at odds with our conventional understanding of what it means to be a metal. In so-called \u201cbad metals\u201d\u2014a technical term, explains Columbia physicist Dmitri Basov\u2014electrons hit unexpected resistance: each other. Instead of the electrons behaving like individual balls bouncing about, they become correlated with one another, clumping up so that their need to move more collectively impedes the flow of an electrical current.<\/p>\n<p>Bad metals may make for poor electrical conductors, but it turns out that they make good quantum materials. In work published on February 13 in the journal <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adr5926\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Science<\/i><\/a>, Basov\u2019s group unexpectedly observed unusual optical properties in the bad metal molybdenum oxide dichloride (MoOCl<sub>2<\/sub>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Metals, as most know them, are good conductors of electricity. That\u2019s because the countless electrons in a metal like gold or silver move more or less freely from one atom to the next, their motion impeded only by occasional collisions with defects in the material. There are, however, metallic materials at odds with our conventional [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209635","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\/209635","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\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}