However, this wasn’t the only surprise that the team encountered. Scientists have recently found that in certain materials and conditions, groups of electrons flow collectively and behave similar to a liquid. Using high-powered computers, project collaborators at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, simulated how the group of electrons flowed. Their images revealed that the electrons flowed into vortices, like whirlpools — a behavior that has yet to be documented in the presence of a magnetic field.
“The whirlpools actually persist even if the interactions between electrons are very weak,” said Adbhut Gupta, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in Heremans’ lab. “At this point, not much is known about this collective behavior in the weak interaction limit. It’s a new phenomenon, one that a single particle would not have shown. Ours is the first experiment to hint at this kind of collective behavior.”
Also working on the study was Gitansh Kataria, a graduate student in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, part of the Virginia Tech College of Engineering.
The team’s discoveries could be critical in helping scientists rethink some of the most fundamental physics theories, such as Fermi liquid theory, which describes the normal state of metals at low temperatures.
“What we found is that those theories are obeyed but only proximately. We saw deviations from the theoretical expectations,” said Heremans. “That’s interesting because if everything is according to theory, why is there a need to do experiments to begin with? It’s not that we have to agree completely, but we have to understand what is missing from the theory.”
The outcomes of this study could be applied to help improve electronics, such as sensors and telecommunication devices, Heremans said. Plus, this research could help further the cutting-edge field of quantum computing, part of which relies on electron-electron interactions to form new quantum states. Understanding electron behavior will allow physicists to fully harness the power of electrons in new innovations and applications.
— Written by Rasha Aridi
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September 15, 2021 at 11:21PM
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New physics research reveals fresh complexities about electron behavior in materials - Virginia Tech Daily
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