Water is a liquid and can be produced as streams, waves, whirlpools, and other fluid phenomena.
It's not possible with electricity. The particles that make up an electric current are so small that any collective behavior among them is drowned out by larger influences. In certain materials and under certain conditions, the effects can fade away. The electrons can flow together.
Physicists at MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science have observed electrons in whirlpools, a hallmark of fluid flow that has never been seen before.
The professor of physics at MIT says that there has been no direct proof that electron waves are real. It's a clear sign of being in a new regime, where electrons behave as a fluid, not as individual particles.
The design of more efficient electronics could be influenced by the observations.
Levitov says that when electrons go in a fluid state, they're interested in designing low-power electronics. It is another step in that direction.
The new paper was co-authored by Levitov and others at the Weizmann Institute for Science in Israel and the University of Colorado.
A group of people squeezing together.
The momenta and trajectory of electrons in the current are influenced by the material and its atoms. electron behavior is dominated by these processes
Physicists believe that in the absence of classical processes, quantum effects should take over. electrons should pick up on each other's quantum behavior and move together as a fluid Liquid-like behavior should emerge in ultra clean materials.
Levitov and colleagues at the University of Manchester reported signatures of fluid-like electron behavior in Graphene, an atom-thin sheet of carbon. The current could flow through the constrictions with no resistance. It was suggested that the electrons in the current were able to squeeze through the pinch points, much like a fluid.
Levitov looked at other electron fluid phenomena. He and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute for Science looked to see electron plasms. The most striking and ubiquitous feature in the flow of regular fluids has not yet been observed in electron fluids despite many theoretical predictions.
The flow is chaneling.
The team looked for a compound that exhibited exotic electronic properties when isolated in two-dimensional form.
"Tungsten ditelluride is one of the new quantum materials where electrons are interacting and behaving as quantum waves rather than particles." The material is very clean which makes it easy to see the behavior.
The researchers created a single crystal of the material. They used two different techniques to pattern each flake into a center channel and a circular chamber. The pattern was etched into thin gold that has classical electronic properties.
At ultralow temperatures of 4.5 kelvins, they ran a current through each patterned sample and measured the current flow at specific points. The device was developed in Zeldov's lab. The team was able to see how electrons flowed through the patterned channels in each sample using the device.
The electrons flowing through patterned channels in gold did not reverse direction even when some of the current passed through each side chamber. The electrons flowed through the channel and swirled into the side chambers, much like water would do. Small whirlpools were created in each chamber by the electrons.
The flow direction in the chambers was different from that in the central strip. It is the same physics as that in ordinary fluids, but happening with electrons on the smallest scale. That is a sign of electrons being in a fluid regime.
The group's observations are the first of their kind. Experiments confirm a fundamental property in electron behavior. They offer clues to how engineers might design low-power devices that conduct electricity in a more fluid way.
More information: Eli Zeldov, Direct observation of vortices in an electron fluid, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04794-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04794-y Journal information: Nature
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