Metals and yang are physics yin and yang, their material properties are controlled by the movement of their electricity – metals should conduct electricity freely, while insurers hold them in place .
So when physicists from Princeton University in the US discovered a quantum quarry of metals kicking around inside insulating fertilizers, they were lost for an explanation.
We will have to wait for more reviews to find out exactly what is going on. But one tantalizing possibility is that a previously unseen grain is working, one that represents a neutral ground in electron conduction. They call it a ‘neutral fermion’.
“This came as a complete surprise,” says physicist Sanfeng Wu of Princeton University in the USA.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What’s going on here?’ We don’t understand it yet.”
The phenomenon at the center of the detection is quantum oscillation. As the term implies, it involves the back and forth rotation of freely moving particles under certain test conditions.
To get a little more technical, the oscillations occur when material is cooled to levels where quantum behavior is easier to control and a magnetic field is applied and adjusted.
By tapping the magnetic field up and down, unrelated particles, such as electrons, pass between energy bands called Landau levels.
This is a method commonly used to study the atomic landscape in which electrons pass through a substance, especially in those with metabolic properties.
Insulators are thought to be another fish kettle. With their electricity following strict stay-at-home orders, quantum oscillations are not a thing. Anyway, they shouldn’t be.
The team looked at tungsten ditelluride, which is a strange semimetal that takes up insulating properties when immersed in a magnetic field – and was surprised to see quantum oscillations occur.
Despite the panic, they have some ideas of what might be going on. While the cost of flow of this insulator would make a conductor (which is the paradox), a ‘flow’ of neutral grains would correspond to the quantum insulator and oscillator bill, which makes more sense.
“Our experimental results contradict all existing theories based on charged fermions, but they could be interpreted in the presence of tax-neutral fermions,” the colleague Pengjie Wang adds.
The only problem is that there should not be very neutral fermions, according to the General Model of Granular Physics.
Grains are grains that are similar to the ‘Lego blocks’ of matter, while bosons are the other basic type of grains – grains that bear taxes.
A truly neutral grain is also an antiparticle itself – and this is something we saw in bosons, but never made fermions.
So the discovery of a truly neutral fermion might rewrite our understanding of physics, but that’s not what the researchers think is happening here – instead they think that do not find more of a neutral quasiparticle, which is a quantum type of hybrid grains. .
To understand what a quasiparticle is, think of the physics of grains as a study of music.
Basic grains such as quarries and electricity are individual instruments. They are the basis for a number of larger grains, from three-piece rock bands as proteins or symphonies as whole atoms.
Even bands that play in sync on challenging levels can be seen as one event – a hemisphere that for all purposes plays as one.
A strange quantum can smear electrical buildings in ways that scatter fragments of their charge over spaces. In other words, some electron quasiparticles carry some beats of the electron, as it spins, but not the cost, effectively creating a neutral version of itself.
It has not yet been worked out what quasiparticle flavor works here (if at all), but the researchers describe it as a completely new area not only in experiments, but in theory.
“If our definitions are correct, we are seeing a fundamentally new form of quantum matter,” Wu says.
“We are now contemplating a completely new quantum world hidden in insurers. It is possible that we have lost recognition of them over the last few decades.”
Neutral fermion has the potential to improve the stability of quantum machinery, so finding evidence of one here would be more than academic curiosity, with promising practical applications.
It is still early. But so much discovery in science has emerged from those temporal words, ‘What’s going on here? ‘
This research was published in Nature.