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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: 5, Funny) by Ryuugami on Monday March 03 2014, @11:00AM

    by Ryuugami (2925) on Monday March 03 2014, @11:00AM (#9976)

    At first glance I read "creation of biexcitons" as "creation of biextcoins", and thought that this is yet another slightly satirical article about the newest hip Bitcoin-clone.

    Luckily, I was wrong.

    OTOH, their naming sense needs some work. It may behave like a droplet, but "dropleton" sounds like something a marketroid would come up with. "Buy Dropleton, It Drops Better!"

    --
    If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheSage on Monday March 03 2014, @11:22AM

    by TheSage (133) on Monday March 03 2014, @11:22AM (#9978) Journal

    I'm currently reading the (highly recommended) book "Moonshine beyond the Monster" by Terry Gannon. There, I found this gem, which seems apropriate

    One of the more carefree creative outlets for mathematicians is through their happy role as nomenclators.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Ryuugami on Monday March 03 2014, @11:32AM

      by Ryuugami (2925) on Monday March 03 2014, @11:32AM (#9981)

      Good quote, off it goes to my quote file :)

      I sometimes envy people who have a sense for naming things. Mostly when naming characters in RPGs, or ship designs in space 4X games, though. If I ever discover something important, I'll likely spend more time thinking of a name then doing the actual discovery.

      As the saying goes, there are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

      --
      If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by ls671 on Monday March 03 2014, @12:27PM

    by ls671 (891) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 03 2014, @12:27PM (#10000) Homepage

    Same here. That tends to prove how easy we can get brainwashed with all that bitcoins hype lately. Well, more precisely, it is a feature of the humain brain; it will try to make something that it doesn't know look like something that it knows.

    --
    Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by linsane on Monday March 03 2014, @12:56PM

    by linsane (633) on Monday March 03 2014, @12:56PM (#10012)

    Likewise! I can see the (as yet undiscovered) Bitcion having some very interesting properties, for example
    - Obeys a modified version of heisenburg's uncertainty principle where the more it observed the less likely its values are to be stable
    - There is a slowly increasing number of them in existence with a theoretical maximum number
    - The more energy that is expended in the production of Bitcions the lower the production rate
    - The Bitcion is a classical particle until it has been divided several million times to its fundamental quantum unit (satoshion?)
    etc ..

    profit?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @03:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @03:28PM (#10072)

      "The more energy that is expended in the production of Bitcions the lower the production rate"

      Actually, if you consider the acceleration of matter, the more energy that you expend to accelerate an object the less it causes it to move faster. Hence it would take an infinite amount of energy to approach the speed of light.