DROPLETON- A NEW DISCOVERY

摘要

In the February 27, 2014 issue of the online Nature, it has been reported that Andy Almand-Hunter and his colleagues of Cundiff group in the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at Colorado, USA when shined a laser on a sample of gallium arsenide (GaAs), quite unexpectedly, observed a new entity. Laser pulse created excitons- pairs of holes- in the material and when the density of excitons reached a critical value, the pairs dissolved and the electrons and holes arranged themselves in new formations. Inside the material electrons and holes flow around each other like particles in a liquid confined within a small droplet. In order to understand what they are observing they contacted their theorist colleagues at Philipps-University Marburg in Germany, who came up with the idea that the experimentalists had made quantum droplets. This is like a quantum form of a typical liquid and scientists called it 'dropleton'. It is a particle inside matter and it is an entity whose properties are determined by its environment.