film the motion of a single electron
Researchers Catch Motion of a Single Electron
on Video
Using pulses of high-intensity sound, two Brown
University physicists have succeeded in making a movie
showing the motion of a single electron. Humphrey Maris, a
physics professor at Brown University, and Wei Guo, a Brown
doctoral student, were able to film the electron as it moved
through a container of superfluid helium.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown
University] — To observe the motion of an electron – an
elementary particle with a mass that is one billionth of a
billionth of a billionth of a gram – has been considered to be
impossible. So when two Brown University physicists showed
movies of electrons moving through liquid helium at the 2006
International Symposium on Quantum Fluids and Solids in Kyoto,
they raised some eyebrows.
The images, which were published online on May
31, 2007, in the Journal
of Low Temperature Physics, show scattered points of
light moving down the screen – some in straight lines, some
following a snakelike path. The
Matrix it’s not.
Still, the fact that they can be seen at all is astounding. “We
were astonished when we first saw an electron moving across the
screen,” said Humphrey Maris, a professor of physics at Brown
University. “Once we had the idea, setting it up was
surprisingly easy.”
Electrons: The Video
Captured on a home video camera, some electrons follow a
straight path through superfluid helium (far left). Those
entrained in a superfluid vortex follow a snakelike path.
Image: Humphrey
Maris and Wei Guo
Maris and Wei Guo, a doctoral student, took
advantage of the bubbles that form around electrons in supercold
liquid helium. Using sound waves to expand the bubbles and a
coordinated strobe light to illuminate them, Guo was able to
catch their movements on a home video camera.
A free electron repels the atoms that surround
it, creating a small space, or bubble, around itself. In
conventional liquids, the bubble shrinks to nothing because the
surface tension of the liquid works against the repulsive force.
Superfluid helium has very little surface tension, so the bubble
can become much larger. The two opposing forces balance when the
diameter of the bubble is about 40 angstroms – still far to tiny
to see.
The researchers used a planar transducer –
basically, a loudspeaker that produces flat, not focused, sound
waves – to pummel the whole volume of liquid helium with sound.
As each wave overtook an electron bubble, it alternately
increased and decreased the surrounding pressure. Under negative
pressure, the bubbles expanded to about eight microns, the size
of a small speck of dust, then shrank again as the next wave of
high pressure washed over them. A strobe light, synchronized to
the sound pulse, illuminated the bubbles without overheating the
chamber.
Running a camcorder in “super night mode,” Guo
and Maris were able to record the approximately 2,000 photons
they estimate were scattered by the expanded bubbles, producing
a series of electron-bubble images on each frame of videotape.
“The results are very original and really
spectacular,” said Sébastien Balibar, research director for
physics at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, “imaging single
vortices of atomic size with a sound wave is an astonishing
achievement.”
To be sure they were seeing electron bubbles and
not just trapped dust, the researchers gradually increased the
power to the transducer. They detected no points of light at low
power and then a rapid increase in the appearance of bubbles at
a particular voltage, just as their calculations predicted. Dust
particles would exhibit no such threshold.
The researchers had planned to introduce streams
of electrons into the chamber from a radioactive source, but
found that even without a source, a number of electrons could be
seen moving through the chamber. Most traveled in a fairly
straight line leading away from the transducer, which produces a
flow of heat down through the liquid.
A few of the electrons, however, followed a
distinctly different snakelike path. Maris and Guo hypothesize
that those electrons are following the lines of superfluid
vortices – a phenomenon akin to a tornado in which the liquid
spins at high velocity around a line. “The vortex is like a
piece of string running through the liquid,” said Maris. “The
electron bubble is attracted to the core of the vortex and gets
attached to it. It’s as though it’s sliding down this rope that
winds through the fluid.” By following the path that the
electron takes as it slides along the vortex, the researchers
were able to observe vortex lines for the first time. “People
never thought it would be possible to visualize the vortex
lines,” said Guo, “but then, almost by accident, we saw them.”
Editors: Brown
University has a fiber link television studio available for
domestic and international live and taped interviews and
maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more
information, call the Office of Media Relations at (401)
863-2476.
Source: Brown
University
film the
motion of a single electron
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