A cultural blog with Kyrie O'Connor

Buying a stairway to electrons



“How you doing?”


2. You know how the Houston Symphony is doing a program of Led Zeppelin? Matty B coughs up video of Stairway to Heaven done as faux-Gregorian chant.

Check it out. You can also find Boulevard of Broken Dreams, if that’s more your fancy.

3. I like to get the jump on SciGuy, so call this the press release of the day, from University of Illinois. It’s about bosons. Not to be confused with buffalo.






“High- and low-energy scales are inextricably coupled in the cuprates,” Phillips said. “Normally, when you remove a single electron from most systems, one empty state is created. In the cuprates, however, when you remove an electron, you create two empty states – both of which occur at low energy, but paradoxically, one of the states comes from the high-energy scale.”

Experimental evidence of this “one to two” phenomenon was first reported in 1990 and explained phenomenologically by University of Groningen physicist George A. Sawatzky (now at the University of British Columbia) and colleagues. What was missing was a low-energy theory that explained how a high-energy state could live at low energy.

Phillips, with physics professor Robert G. Leigh and graduate student Ting-Pong Choy, have constructed such a theory, and have shown that a charged 2e boson makes this all possible.

“When this 2e boson binds with a hole, the result is a new electronic state that has a charge of e,” Phillips said. “In this case, the electron is a combination of this new state and the standard, low-energy state. Electrons are not as simple as we thought.”

Categories: General
Kyrie O'Connor

5 Responses

  1. Stew says:

    Kyrie, can we get a link to the original article for that piece?

  2. State of Flux says:

    So wot they are basically saying is, to use a baseball analogy , is that the Astros are in no way a

    Fighting Boson, or at the high end of the energy scale, hiding within a low energy state. They are just pure low energy and the team needs to be charged

    with a heaping dose of 2e.

    Copper oxide ceramic bats perchance.

    CHARRRRRGE!! Go Fighting Bosons, Yeaaaaaa TEAM!!

  3. JP says:

    I like the term “buckeyball” better.

    Boson is so, boring.

  4. Stan says:

    Poor physics folk, they are so 50 years ago. They struggle to be noticed. The present scientific glamor child is biology.

    Also a huge struggle underway between evolutionary biology and religion, with religious folks in denial of 2 million years of biological evolution. They only want to deal with the last 12000 years of cultural evolution.