Seoul, October 17 (IANS). A group of South Korean scientists have discovered electronic crystallites in a solid material for the first time in the world, which is expected to help make progress in studies on high-temperature superconductivity.
A research team led by Professor Kim Keun-su at Yonsei University in Seoul achieved this feat. According to South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT, a paper titled “Electronic Roton and Wigner Crystallites in a Two-Dimensional Dipole Liquid” was posted in Nature, a leading science journal.
Yonhap news agency reported that this is the world’s first experimental discovery of the structure, which was theorized by Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner in 1934.
A Wigner crystal is a solid or crystalline formation of a gas of electrons enabled by strong repulsion between electrons at low electron density. Generally, crystal formation is understood as the attraction between atoms.
“Until now, scientists have had a dichotomous notion of electrons: ordered and unordered,” Kim said.
“But our research found a third type of electronic crystallites with short-range crystalline order.”
The discovery by Kim’s team is expected to help better understand high-temperature superconductivity and superfluidity, long-standing problems in modern physics.
High-temperature superconductors, materials with critical temperatures, have the potential to create innovations in the energy, transportation, and medical industries because they can be easily cooled with liquid nitrogen.
Superfluids are also known to have potential practical uses in healthcare, the electronics industry, and others.
Kim said his team observed an electronic crystallite 1 to 2 nanometers in size while measuring the energy-momentum relationship of electrons doped with alkali metals.
-IANS
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