Introducing the ‘orbiton’

Published in Physics World, 18 Apr 2012

Condensed-matter physicists love quasiparticles, and now they have another entity to admire – the “orbiton”. First predicted a decade ago, the orbiton is a collective excitation of electrons in a 1D solid that behaves just like an electron – with orbital angular momentum but with no spin or electric charge. As well as completing the set of three electron-like quasiparticles predicted to exist in a 1D solid, the discovery, made by an international team of physicists, could offer new insights into the origin of high-temperature superconductivity.

Quasiparticles offer physicists a convenient quantum-mechanical description of the collective behaviour of electrons and atoms in solid materials. Perhaps the most famous example is the “hole”, which describes the absence of electrons in a semiconductor in terms of a positively charged electron-like particle. […]

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