{"id":32845,"date":"2016-12-21T19:18:51","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T03:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/scientists-detect-a-quantum-crystal-of-electrons-and-watch-it-melt"},"modified":"2017-06-04T13:56:51","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T20:56:51","slug":"scientists-detect-a-quantum-crystal-of-electrons-and-watch-it-melt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/scientists-detect-a-quantum-crystal-of-electrons-and-watch-it-melt","title":{"rendered":"Scientists detect a quantum crystal of electrons and \u2018watch\u2019 it melt"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For the first time, MIT physicists have observed a highly ordered crystal of electrons in a semiconducting material and documented its melting, much like ice thawing into water. The observations confirm a fundamental phase transition in quantum mechanics that was theoretically proposed more than 80 years ago but not experimentally documented until now.<\/p>\n

The team, led by MIT professor of physics Raymond Ashoori and his postdoc Joonho Jang, used a spectroscopy technique developed in Ashoori\u2019s group. The method relies on electron \u201ctunneling,\u201d a quantum mechanical process that allows researchers to inject electrons at precise energies into a system of interest\u2014in this case, a system of electrons trapped in two dimensions. The method uses hundreds of thousands of short electrical pulses to probe a sheet of electrons in a semiconducting material<\/a> cooled to extremely low temperatures, just above absolute zero.<\/p>\n

With their tunneling technique, the researchers shot electrons into the supercooled material to measure the energy states of electrons within the semiconducting sheet. Against a background blur, they detected a sharp spike in the data. After much analysis, they determined that the spike was the precise signal that would be given off from a highly ordered crystal of electrons vibrating in unison.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the first time, MIT physicists have observed a highly ordered crystal of electrons in a semiconducting material and documented its melting, much like ice thawing into water. The observations confirm a fundamental phase transition in quantum mechanics that was theoretically proposed more than 80 years ago but not experimentally documented until now. The team, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32845","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\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32845"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65540,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32845\/revisions\/65540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}