{"id":224669,"date":"2025-11-07T01:18:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T07:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/quantum-pinball-state-of-matter-in-electrons-allows-both-conducting-and-insulating-properties-physicists-discover"},"modified":"2025-11-07T01:18:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T07:18:23","slug":"quantum-pinball-state-of-matter-in-electrons-allows-both-conducting-and-insulating-properties-physicists-discover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/quantum-pinball-state-of-matter-in-electrons-allows-both-conducting-and-insulating-properties-physicists-discover","title":{"rendered":"Quantum \u2018pinball\u2019 state of matter in electrons allows both conducting and insulating properties, physicists discover"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/quantum-pinball-state-of-matter-in-electrons-allows-both-conducting-and-insulating-properties-physicists-discover.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Electricity powers our lives, including our cars, phones, computers, and more, through the movement of electrons within a circuit. While we can\u2019t see these electrons, electric currents moving through a conductor flow like water through a pipe to produce electricity.<\/p>\n<p>Certain materials, however, allow that electron flow to \u201cfreeze\u201d into crystallized shapes, triggering a transition in the state of matter that the electrons collectively form. This turns the material from a conductor to an insulator, stopping the flow of electrons and providing a unique window into their complex behavior. This phenomenon makes possible new technologies in quantum computing, advanced superconductivity for energy and medical imaging, lighting, and highly precise atomic clocks.<\/p>\n<p>A team of Florida State University-based physicists, including National High Magnetic Field Laboratory Dirac Postdoctoral Fellow Aman Kumar, Associate Professor Hitesh Changlani and Assistant Professor Cyprian Lewandowski, have shown the conditions necessary to stabilize a phase of matter in which electrons exist in a solid crystalline lattice but can \u201cmelt\u201d into a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/liquid+state\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">liquid state<\/a>, known as a generalized Wigner crystal. Their work was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41535-025-00792-1\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in npj Quantum Materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Electricity powers our lives, including our cars, phones, computers, and more, through the movement of electrons within a circuit. While we can\u2019t see these electrons, electric currents moving through a conductor flow like water through a pipe to produce electricity. Certain materials, however, allow that electron flow to \u201cfreeze\u201d into crystallized shapes, triggering a transition [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,1512,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-mobile-phones","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224669","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=224669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}