This scanning tunneling microscopic lense picture of a graphene sheet exposes that a Wigner crystal– a honeycomb plan of electrons, like an electron ice– has actually formed inside a layered structure below. Credit: Image by Hongyuan Li and Shaowei Li, thanks to Nature
Breakthrough shows strong state of electrons anticipated more than 90 years back.
More than 90 years back, physicist Eugene Wigner anticipated that at low densities and cold temperature levels, electrons that typically zip through products would freeze into location, forming an electron ice, or what has actually been called a Wigner crystal.
While physicists have actually acquired indirect proof that Wigner crystals exist, nobody has actually had the ability to snap an image of one– previously.
Physicists from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley just recently released in the journal Nature a picture of electron ice sandwiched in between 2 semiconductor layers. The image is evidence favorable that these crystals exist.
“If you say you have an electron crystal, show me the crystal,” senior author Feng Wang, professors senior researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley teacher of physics, informed Nature.
The Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley group, including physicists from the laboratories of Wang, Michael Crommie, and Alex Zettl, established a brand-new method for envisioning the crystals, which tend to “melt” when penetrated. By putting a graphene sheet over the semiconductor sandwich, the group had the ability to penetrate the Wigner crystal with a scanning tunneling microscopic lense without melting the sample and show the crystalline lattice structure, as Wigner anticipated.
According to doctoral prospect Hongyuan Li and previous postdoctoral fellow Shaowei Li, co-first authors of the paper, the research study not just lays a strong structure for comprehending electron Wigner crystals, however likewise supplies a technique that is typically suitable for imaging associated electron lattices in other systems.
Reference: “Imaging two-dimensional generalized Wigner crystals” by Hongyuan Li, Shaowei Li, Emma C. Regan, Danqing Wang, Wenyu Zhao, Salman Kahn, Kentaro Yumigeta, Mark Blei, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Sefaattin Tongay, Alex Zettl, Michael F. Crommie and Feng Wang, 29 September 2021, Nature
DOI: 10.1038/ s41586-021-03874 -9
