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posted by LaminatorX on Monday March 03 2014, @10:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the (sigh)-still-no-Puerto-Ricoton dept.

amblivious writes:

"Researchers investigating the creation of biexcitons noticed an unexpected drop in energy when creating multiple biexcitons in gallium arsenide, leading to the discovery of a new state of matter; the dropleton. Excitons are quasi-particles created when a photon knocks an electron loose from a material, causing an electron hole. If the forces of other charges nearby keep the electron close enough to the hole a state known as an exciton forms where the combined electron and hole act together as though they are a single particle. Biexcitons consist of two of these quasi-particles and collectively behave like a molecule. In this discovery several excitons are behaving together in a 'quantum fog' and behave like a droplet, hence the name.

See the article in Nature for more information."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by cosurgi on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:02AM

    by cosurgi (272) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:02AM (#11088) Journal

    exactly. It is an educated guess. The only reason to think that it is exactly the same formulas is that the results agree with experimental measurements with great accuracy. If they stop agreeing, then it means that we need a new theory :)

    We are not observing individual electrons here. But we can measure the extra energy level (actually all of them: 1s, 2s, 2p, ...) created by this exciton pair. We have spectrometers that have remarkable resolution, and they allow us to see those levels, just like we are observing those energy levels (using spectrometers also) in a hydrogen atom.

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  • (Score: 1) by cosurgi on Wednesday March 05 2014, @08:53AM

    by cosurgi (272) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @08:53AM (#11220) Journal

    Oh, one more thing - in fact we know that this model is sometimes overly simplified. And when experimental results stop agreeing with this theory we know in fact that this is due to this simplification. There are more complex models too, which work when the simplest one stops working. Condensed matter physics is very difficult, because if you try to calculate explicitly 10^23 atoms - you are dead in the water - there is no enough computer memory. So then we are using periodic boundary conditions and many other tricks to reduce memory footprint.

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