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Wigner Crystal
April 17 , 2024
222 days
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- It is hard to coax electrons to form a crystal, and even harder to measure this structure.
- But physicists have now managed to directly image a “Wigner crystal” – and their images are the clearest ones yet.
- The researchers employed a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) and pristine graphene samples to observe the formation of the Wigner Crystal directly.
- The Wigner crystal is one of the most fascinating quantum phases of matter that has been predicted and the subject of numerous studies claiming to have found.
- At very low temperatures, however, repulsive electric forces win out, and the electrons end up arranging themselves into a uniform grid, or a crystal.
- Physicist Eugene Wigner predicted this phenomenon in 1934.
- But researchers only recently started to understand how to create Wigner crystals in the lab.
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