Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can you make matter out of pure electrons?

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about the quest to build a crystal out of only electrons.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeartRadio app. Search All the Smoke and listen now. Hey, Daniel, have you started working on the menu for our food truck idea? I have, actually. I've been experimenting with spice mixtures. Ooh, reserving spicy food? More like sparky food. What do you mean?

I was going to sprinkle electrons on top of everything to sort of jazz it up a bit. Wow. Is that the latest gastronomical trend? What do electrons taste like? You know, I'm not actually sure. Maybe lightning in a bottle? That would be shocking. Electrons will be extra charge. Actually, maybe they'll be negative charge. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the co-author of Frequently Asked Questions about the universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I love eating electrons. Imagine they kind of taste like maybe a metal, a little medley. You know, they taste like pasta when they're in my pasta. They taste like ice cream when they're in my ice cream. They taste like tacos when they're in my tacos. Everything tastes like electrons because electrons taste like everything. Because I guess everything has electrons. Everything has electrons. At least everything that I've eaten. I've never had a pure sample of protons, for example. Are you positive about that? Because I don't live in the center of the sun. How do you know? You didn't

accidentally eat something that had its electrons stripped away. That's true, I guess. If everybody accidentally eats like eight spiders at night, then probably an individual proton has flown into my mouth one time without me noticing. Yeah, or maybe two or three. I wonder if your tongue can taste an individual particle the way your eyeball can see an individual photon. It must, right? Like, don't you have little nerve sensors that detect individual things, right?

I suppose so. I wonder if people have done quantum tasting experiments. Oh, maybe they have and maybe they haven't. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. In which we invite you to taste the entire universe to take a long drink of all of the mysteries of our universe, to try to imbibe everything that we do understand about the way the universe works from the smallest tiny little bits, electrons and protons whizzing around all the way up to the massive black holes at the centers of our galaxy that are flushing it all down at the end of the dead. We invite you to think about all of these big questions, to ask, to wonder, to explore, and to listen to us make bad jokes about all of it. That's right, because it is a tasty universe full of amazing and filling and nutritious facts and phenomenon out there for us to explore and try out and hopefully satisfy our curiosity. And we joke about what it's like to taste an electron because mostly we experience the universe at sort of a certain scale.

Things are like roughly a meter in size or things that. weigh about a kilogram or take about a second to eat. That's our familiar experience of the universe. But we know that there's another picture that if you drill down to the microphysics, that everything that's around you is actually made of tiny little particles towing and frowing and coming together to make this incredible emergent experience of our lives. And it's fascinating to try to reconcile those two things, to understand how all these tiny little particles do that dance,

to come together to make blueberries and ice cream and tacos and blueberry ice cream tacos. Yeah, and fortunately, we are here to taste this amazing buffet of knowledge and amazing fact that the universe has to offer. And we are here to ask those questions and hopefully explain them to you in a way that everyone can understand. Yeah, and you can explore this sort of in two directions. You could start from the tiny little bits and say, hmm, what can these bits do? How can they come together to make different kinds of stuff?

That can be tricky to do unless you have an incredible. supercomputer or our master of particles, but we can also do it in the other direction. We can look around and say, hmm, what kind of things are there in the universe and how do we explain them? How do we look around and say, this bit of lava and that kitten and that black hole all somehow come from the same basic rules of the universe? What else is possible? How do we explain all of these incredible variety of things using the same fundamental physical laws? And what else are those physical laws capable of producing in our sort of weird emergent lives. Yeah, because I guess the universe has been cooking for billions of years

and it seems to be following the same recipe book, same rules, the same laws of physics, and most of the time the same three ingredients. That's right. Most of the stuff that's out there in the universe is made of electrons and two kinds of quarks, up quarks and down quarks, which you can put together in all sorts of amazing different ways to cook up basically everything that you've ever eaten and experienced. But even just those three can make an incredible variety of things and also different kinds of things. We see them dance together to make liquids.

We see them spread out to make gases. We see them click together to make crystals and solids. It's really amazing the breadth of sort of different characteristics and properties that these same basic ingredients can reveal. Yeah, it's a pretty amazing menu that the universe has put together, which is three ingredients. Although I feel like it's maybe not the full menu. all of that stuff made out of electrons and quarks is really only 5% of the universe, right? I wonder if there's like a super secret menu out there.

That's right. If you want to order the universe animal style, you got to know what's off menu. And you're absolutely right. Everything that we have ever experienced or stepped on or put in our mouths or stepped on and then put in our mouths are made of these three basic elements. But there is a lot of other stuff out there. Most of the matter in the universe isn't actually made out of these atoms. it's made out of something else called dark matter, which no human has ever tasted, though it's probably flown into your mouth and then back out the other side of your head

without you noticing. Back out of the other parts of your body. It is dark matter after all. That's right. But here we're talking about physics dark matter, not biological dark matter, which everybody produces in their gut. But you're absolutely right. There is more out there in the universe than just these three bits.

But we are still trying to understand how these three bits come together to do their dances and to make all this incredible phenomenon that we can actually order at food trucks and enjoy. Yeah. And even though the many of the things we see and can taste and touch is made up of only three ingredients, it is still pretty, as you say, fascinating how much stuff is out there that we can look at and study. It makes you kind of wonder what else is out there. That's true. There's an incredible variety of stuff out there. And it makes us wonder about how it all works. It also makes us wonder what else we could possibly make out of these little Lego bits. of the universe and can you make weird kinds of matter by like only using one of them can you

build stuff out just up quarks or just down quarks or just electrons these are the kind of weird ideas that physicists like to explore so today on the podcast we'll be asking the question can you make matter out of pure electrons hmm how about impure electrons are you saying you can make matter out of dirty electrons I mean people Purely electrons. Electrons and nothing else. There's no such thing as a dirty electron. Because remember, all electrons are really just the same electron.

There's really only one electron in the universe. Wait, wait, what? What do you mean? There's one electron field. Are you saying we're all like inside of a giant electron? I'm making the point that all electrons really are. I'm making the point that all electrons really are the same. There's no way to like label them and to say this electron is different in some way than another electron.

They have their quantum states, you know, in and momentum and location, but there's nothing really about them that's different. I mean, you're you and I mean, we feel different, but electrons don't have an identity. And one way to think about that is, as you say, that all electrons are actually just ripples in the same universe spanning electron field. So really, every electron is just sort of like part of the big electron field of the universe. And that's why they're all identical because they're really just all part of the same thing. They're not perfectly identical, right?

Don't they have different quantum characteristics and maybe those quantum characteristics are infinite also? They have different quantum characteristics like location, right, which we think maybe there are an infinite possible number of values of it. And so you could have an electron here and electron there. And you're right, those are distinguishable technically from a quantum mechanical point of view. But you could swap them and there would be no difference in the quantum state. It's not like they have any other secret labels. You know, this one's Maria and that one's Fred and they behave slightly differently in the same situation. If you swapped all the electrons in the universe, nothing would change.

But don't some of them have like spin in different directions? And can't those directions also be infinite? Well, the spin can't be infinite because that's quantized, right? And so they can spin up one half or down one half. There's only two possibilities there. Though there are an infinite number of spin axes for these electrons. My point is just that that's all there is to the electron, is this list of characteristics. There's nothing else.

There's no like identity to each electron. It's just this list of characteristics. So if you took like electron number seven and electron number 11 and you swapped them, including all of their quantum states, the universe could not notice any difference because all we can notice are their quantum states. Interesting. All right. Well, then the question here is, can you make matter out of pure electrons?

And I thought this was a weird question because aren't electrons matter? Don't we consider electrons be part of the particles that are matter particles? Yeah, that's true. I guess a single electron you could consider matter. But if you, like, went to a restaurant and somebody served you a single electron for dinner, you might not be happy with what you got. Well, it depends on how many courses the dinner has. If it has, like, you know, 10 to the 27, courses of electrons, that might be definitely filling. What kind of tip do you have to leave for that many courses?

I mean, think about the dishes that they had to serve. 10 to the 2.7, obviously. 10 to the 2.7 is not 10% of 10 to the 26, man. You're thinking about 10 to the 25. Anyway, it's a good question. Here, when we talk about matter. or we're really referring to something on our scale, you know, things that we can play with,

stuff we can make in the lab and poke. Can you have like a macroscopic serving of just electrons? What would that be like? What would its properties be? Can you build a complex thing out of just electrons? Yes, exactly. What are the emergent properties of a blob of just electrons? What can they do?

Because I guess you can put together quarks, right? Quarks you can't put together and make stuff, right? You can make protons and neutrons and you can make atomic nuclear out of those, right? You can, in fact, make complex structures out of just quarks. Quarks can make protons. They can also make other kinds of stuff, like other hadrons and mesons. There's a whole spectrum of them.

Keyons and pyons and roe particles and omega particles, all sorts of complex stuff. Most of that stuff is unstable. It's heavy and it decays very rapidly into other stuff. The proton is stable. We think a proton hanging out will live forever. Neutron weirdly is not stable. A neutron floating in space will last for about 11 minutes. This is a fascinating mystery about exactly how long it survives.

And extra super weird, if you put protons and neutrons together to make an atomic nucleus, as you say, then the neutrons become stable. And one of our listeners on the Discord channel was pointing this out that neutrons are like, maybe the only thing in the universe which is unstable on its own, and then you put it together with other stuff and it becomes stable. That's pretty cool. Interesting. But I guess today we're talking about electrons, and so the question is whether we're

whether we can do the same thing with electrons. Like, can you build another kind of particle maybe with electrons or any kind of like a big crystal or a chunk of stuff made out of purely electron? Yeah. And then can you put it in a spice container and sprinkle it on top of the food we serve in our food truck and charge negative for it? Charge negative. You mean you pay people to eat it? Sounds like a terrible business. Electrons are negatively charged.

You can't charge positive money for them. That would be like against the rules. What if they're positrons? Those are expensive, yeah, for sure. Sounds more positive, too. All right, well, as usual, we were wondering how many people had thought about this question of whether you can make matter out of electrons. So as usual, Daniel went out there to ask people, can you make matter out of pure electrons? Thank you very much to everybody who volunteers to answer these questions.

It's a lot of fun for me to hear what people are thinking before we dig into a topic. And it's a lot of fun for the other listeners to sort of calibrate their knowledge. So thanks again. and if you would like to participate for a future episode, please do not be shy. Write to us to questions at danielanhorpe.com. So think about it for a second. Do you think electrons can hang out and make stuff together?

Here's what people had to say. And that's an interesting question. I'm going to guess no because the electrons being all negatively charged, in other words, all the same charge and not zero, would repel each other. So you would not be able to clump them together in order to make matter. I'm sure if there's somehow high energy, something going on there,

you can make matter out of just electrons, depending probably how you, with what they interact or how they interact. If you can make crystals out of time, I think you can make matter out of electrons. Of course you can make matter out of just electrons. electrons are matter. You can have an electron fluid that is just a cloud of electrons, but if you want to build a solid matter or even a liquid, you probably would need several different kinds of electrons. So, not. I would have said, no, you can't make matter out of just electrons, but the fact you're asking me suggests that answer is incorrect. With that

in mind, I'm going to double down and say that once again you cannot make matter out of just electrons, but over the next 30 minutes, I look to be proved wrong. I honestly have no idea. All right. Sounds like people are split on this question. Some people say yes. Some people say no. Some people are being morally about it like I was saying that electrons are matter.

Yeah, there's a lot of speculation here, and I loved hearing all the ideas that this question sparked in people's minds. Yeah. So I guess maybe let's take a step back here and start at the very fundamental level here and talk about just matter in general. like the daniel what is matter normally made out of so matter when we're talking about like me me and you and the ground beneath us and excluding for the moment all of the dark matter in the universe most of the matter that's around us of course are made out of atoms the hundred basic

building blocks or so of the periodic table are what make up me and you and everything you've ever eaten you take that apart there are electrons on the outside of it whizzing around and at the heart is a nucleus which is made out of these protons and neutrons the protons are They're all positively charged, but they're sort of weirdly stuck together by the strong force. Inside those, of course, are quarks, up quarks and down quarks and a huge mess of gluons sticking them all together. And so essentially you've got protons and neutrons with electrons all around them. And most of these atoms typically are balanced in terms of their charge.

You're the same number of protons as electrons to get a neutral atom. Yeah, that kind of seems important for things to kind of stick together. And I guess what's kind of interesting is that quarks, like you said, can. sort of stick together to make protons and protons can stick together with other neutrons to make atomic nuclei. And so it's kind of weird because all of those things are positively charged and yet they're able to stick together. Yeah, because there's a lot going on inside the nucleus to hold that together. Right. The protons are all positively charged. They repel each other and the electrostatic force there is very strong, right? It goes like one over the distance squared

and these protons are very close together inside the nucleus. So the force pushing them apart is very powerful, but the force pulling them together is even more powerful. This is the strong nuclear force. So there are forces everywhere inside the atom. Inside the proton, there's a strong nuclear force, but that strong force isn't completely captured inside the proton. If you're like on one side of the proton, then you're closer to like one of the corks at the other. So it doesn't all just totally balance out. You still feel a little bit of the strong force. And the same for the neutrons. And that's what lets the protons and neutrons stick together. The strong force is so strong that even just like the residual left over bit that leak out of the proton and neutron are

enough to hold them together and resist the push of the electrostatic force. And so that's how I guess protons and nuclear are able to stick together. It's because there are different forces that play here, right? There's the electromagnetic force pulling it apart, but then there's a strong force holding it together and somehow that finds a balance kind of in these structures. Exactly. And there's a lesson there about the role of forces in matter. We tend to think of matter as made out of matter particles, as you say. Quarks and electrons, we describe the stuff we are made out of in terms of those matter particles. But those matter particles are held together by the forces. There's a lot of energy in those forces, and you couldn't have these structures without the forces. So when you hear

people say, oh, the atom is made of the nucleus and the electrons, and there's a huge amount of empty space between them, I always think, well, it's not really empty space. There's a lot of photons whizzing around there to hold the electron in place in its ground state around the nucleus. There's a huge number of gluons inside the nucleus. So there really isn't any empty space there. And the forces play a really big role in constructing matter. Right, right. Because I guess physicists look at forces in terms of particles, right? Like when an electron pushes another electron or a proton pushes another proton, they're actually exchanging particles. There's two different ways to think about forces. One is in terms of fields. Each electron creates an electric field that's all

around it that pushes on other electrons. This is sort of like Maxwell's idea. Or you could also think about in terms of particles. You can say, well, there aren't really fields. There's just like a bunch of virtual particles that pass momentum around. So when electrons push on other electrons, they're exchanging particles. Either way, though, that space is not empty. So between the electron and the nucleus is either a vast electric field that's tying it all together or a bunch of photons. And this really does contribute to like the matter that matters. Think about a proton, for example. It's made out of three quarks, but those quarks are a tiny fraction of the mass of the proton. Most of the mass of the proton actually comes from the energy of the bonds between them.

So really the proton and the atom is mostly gluons, right, which we tend to think of as a force particle. So the point I want to make is just that there's not a lot of empty space there and that matter that makes us up includes both the forces and the matter particles, all playing their role in this symphony of matter. Okay, so then quarks can build stuff together, right? Like you can make a proton and you can make atomic nuclei. And then overall, that has a positive charge. And then that's kind of how atoms are formed, right? You have this positively charge nuclei, which attracts electrons, which come in and they hang out all together.

And that's how you get an atom of regular matter. Exactly. That's how you get an atom. And the protons that are inside the nucleus, the number of them, as you say, determines the number of electrons you need in order to balance it to make it overall neutral. And that's really crucial. The number of electrons around the nucleus really determine the bulk properties.

Then you stick like 10 to the 26 of these things on a teaspoon. What do they do? What do they look like? That depends mostly on those electrons which surround the atom. And the number of those electrons is determined by the number of protons inside the atom. So it's all connected in this really cool way. Right. And so like in the atoms in my body, I have a lot of electrons, but they're only hanging out together

because they're all attracted to the positively charged nuclei of the atoms, right? But they don't collapse into the atoms, right? they sort of like fly around in orbit around the nucleus. Yeah, it's tempting to think about them in orbit, sort of like an analogy to a planetary system. Remember, these are quantum particles. They don't have classical paths. They're like here and then they're there and there's somewhere else and they don't have to go in between those places that you've seen them. So typically we describe it as like electrons are in their stationary state.

It's a ground state of a quantum particle. It's not technically in an orbit like a classical path. But yeah, the electrons are all hanging out near each other. because the protons are there. Right, but they don't collapse into the nuclei because of what? They don't collapse into the nucleus because they have a minimum energy.

Every solution to the Schrodinger equation has a minimum energy when there's any sort of confinement. And that's not zero. So every quantum field, every quantum solution has a non-zero minimum state. And you could think about that as sort of consistent with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It's impossible to have a particle with zero energy

because then you'd know its energy, zero, and its location, because it wouldn't be moving at all. So there's sort of like a minimum fuzz to all of these particles, which is why they can't collapse into the nucleus, although electrons do spend some fraction of their time inside the nucleus, right? The stationary state is mostly outside the nucleus, but there's some probability for them to be inside the nucleus at any time. But not really, right? Because it's all quantum. It's just a probability. I mean, you said there's a minimum time, but they don't really spend time there, right? I guess what I'm saying is quantum, right? It's not like the cat is alive or

dead. It's like it's, it's live and dead. I like how you say it's quantum, so it's not real. I think what you're saying is that has a probability to be there, but we never actually see it there. We don't collapse the wave function inside the nucleus. There's a really cool set of measurements they do where they try to figure out what fraction of the time or equivalently what probability the electron has to be inside the nucleus. And it has a real effect on measurements we make. We did a whole podcast episode about that once. But the point is, yes, it's a quantum particle. And so has these probabilities to be in different places. That does include being inside the nucleus, which is super weird and awesome.

All right. So that's regular matter. That's what we're made out of. Protons and corks and electrons hanging out together. And there are many different ways for these atoms to hang out together. We'll get into that in a little bit. And then we'll talk about whether you can make stuff like that matter, complex matter, using only electrons. So we'll talk about that.

But first, let's take a quick break. Ninth, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam.

Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate.

Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professional. and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop.

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're asking the question. Can you make matter out of pure electrons? And now, Daniel, do pure electrons cost more than regular electrons? Or, you know, first press electrons?

I like using imported electrons. You know, these domestic electrons are just not very good. Yeah, yeah. You want the Italian ones, like the ones coming straight out of the olives. Exactly. I like Italian and Argentinian electrons. They really have that flavor I like.

Well, it depends on the year, too. And, you know, the terroir, of course, you know, where they come from. You've got to know the, what's the name for a farm that produces electrons? I don't know. I don't know. Lap to table electrons. There you go. Lapt to table.

I like to know my electronure. Yeah, artisanal electrons. That's the kind I want. Each one handcrafted a little bit different from the rest. That's right. Yeah, by tiny little hands. But the question is, can you make stuff out of electrons? Can you make like an olive?

Can you make wine out of an electron or purely electrons? And so this is a weird question because we know that electrons can be part of matter, but usually when they're hanging out with possibly charge nuclei, which is made out of quarks. The question is, can they hang out by themselves? Yeah, and it's really interesting because electrons seem to determine a lot of the properties that we're familiar with. Like if you're looking at a piece of stuff and you ask, does it shine? Is it reflective? Is it dim? Is it brittle? Does it conduct electricity? All these macroscopic chemical quantities that are important to us and in manufacturing and you know, can you

eat it? This kind of stuff. How heavy and dense is it? All of this is determined by how those atoms come together and how reactive they are, what they like to stick to, whether they do like to stick to each other. And that all depends on the electrons, right? Like, are the electrons stuck around an individual atom or do they like to flow from atom to atom? And so condensed matter physicists, the people who really think about like how atoms come together to make different kinds of goo and what kind of properties that goo has, think about electrons as like, are they a fluid? Is there like a liquid of electrons inside my metal that's sort of like flowing through? And so it's really the electrons that determine a lot of these properties. So basically, it's all about the

electrons. Interesting, which I guess begs the question, do you really need the quarks, right? That's kind of what we're asking today is can you make an atom or a block of stuff where it's only electrons? Like, do you actually need quarks to put electrons together? Yeah, and we see some fascinating hints already when we think about strange behaviors of electrons, like in the case of superconductivity. Superconductivity is when electrons can flow with almost no resistance inside a material. Usually there's some resistance. You pass electricity from one spot to another. The wire heats up a little bit.

You lose some energy. But if electrons can flow without any resistance, then they don't lose any energy. That'd be awesome for, like, sending energy really far away and all sorts of stuff. And this happens when electrons come together to make pairs. They're called Cooper pairs of electrons. You take two electrons that are both spin one half. You make this weird sort of quasi-particle with the two electrons combined together

to make effectively a boson, something that has spin one. which doesn't have the same rules as fermions, like bosons can stack on top of each other and be happy and slip right by each other, whereas fermions are like grumpy and don't like to be in the same place. So already we see a hint of electrons doing something weird when they come together just by themselves because they can do this weird superconductivity thing

that they can't do when they're on their own. Right, because I guess on their own, an electronics negatively charge, which tends to repel other electrons. So really, like if you just had two electrons in the universe, they would want to be as far away from each other as possible, right? They would keep pushing each other away for eternity. That's right.

And the key thing to think about is the kinetic energy versus the potential energy. What you're talking about is their potential energy, their desire to push each other apart. They have this strong, kulumbic potential energy from the electrostatic force between them, and it provides a force that pushes them apart. The other kind of energy they can have is kinetic energy, just their velocity. If they have a lot more kinetic energy than the potential energy, then the potential energy doesn't really matter. It doesn't really play a role.

And that's often what's happening inside metals, for example, is that these electrons have a lot of kinetic energy so they can just flow and mostly ignore their repulsion. But if they don't have a lot of kinetic energy, if they're like cold or slow, then that potential energy can really dominate what happens to them. It can really determine like the structures that they can form in their behaviors.

But I guess it's not just this interplay too, right? Like there's other stuff going on inside of these superconductor or these weird materials, right? There's a whole bunch of electrons too, pushing on each electron and all. also other positively charged nuclei hanging out, right? So it's kind of like this really complex soup that kind of gives you these weird behaviors. Yeah, absolutely. It's very complex. And it's not something that we theoretically understand that well. It's not easy to say, here's my setup. Is this

going to be super conductive or not? Like, we don't have the theoretical tools to be able to make those predictions every time, which sort of boggles my line every time I run into that situation. It's like, when we know the particles, we basically know how they interact, why can't we predict what's going to happen. And the answer is, it's complicated, right? There's a lot of chaos and it's not easy to translate from like the rules of what happens to tiny particles to what it's going to be like to have 10 to the 26 of them, right? Sort of like how macroeconomics is hard to predict from microeconomics. Particle physics is based on this idea of like reduction. Let's strip everything down to the tiny basic rules that are going to reveal what everything does. That doesn't

always give you an explanation for what happens and why it happens at the bigger scale. Right. It sounds like you're just complaining how hard your job is, then. I'm amazed at how hard everybody else's job is. That's why I do particle physics, because we don't have to worry about more than five or six particles at once. To me, it's too complicated to even think about. All right. Well, the question here is, can you make stuff out of electrons?

So I guess maybe a step is through what happens if I try to make something out of electrons. Like, if I just get five electrons and put them together in one place, they're probably going to repel each other and try to fly away as far away as possible, right? Because electrons only really feel the electromagnetic force. They don't have this backup force like quarks do to keep them together. Exactly. Electrons don't feel the strong force, right? They feel the electromagnetic force.

They also do feel the weak force. So that's so weak that it's not really relevant here. Do they feel gravity? You know, we don't know the answer to that question, how and whether they feel gravity. That depends on the theory of quantum gravity. And it's sort of a mystery to us, right? Wait, we don't know if electrons feel gravity. We think they do, but we don't really know how they do. For example, say an electron has a probability, a probability to be over here or over there. Where is its gravity? Is it over here or is it over there? Or is it half over here and half over there? We don't know because we don't have a theory

of quantum gravity. We don't know how gravity works for tiny little quantum particles. But I guess, I mean, we know that photons, for example, do bend to the effects of gravity. Like if you shoot photons near a black hole, they're going to bend. If I shoot an electron at a black hole, is it going to bend or is it going to keep flying straight through? It's definitely going to bend, right? And the reason that photons bend near a black hole is not because of their particular gravity as much as it's because of the bending of space from the black hole. So it's really the gravity of the black hole there that's determining the path of the photon. And the electron will also do almost the same thing.

We won't move in the same geodesic as the photon because it does have mass. But yes, absolutely electrons will get bent around a black hole. So they do feel the effects of gravity then. Yes, they feel the effects of gravity and bent space time. But we don't really understand exactly how that works because they're quantum particles. And we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. Sounds like you know they feel gravity, just haven't tried to figure out how it works. Oh, we'd love to, but those experiments are really hard to do, right? Because the force of gravity from an electron is tiny. The smallest things we've ever been able to measure gravity for are like down the size of millimeters. And that's really, really hard because the force of gravity is so

weak compared to everything else. Like a few electrons on the surface of a millimeter size piece of iron will overwhelm the gravity of that iron because just a few electrons have enough. force to overwhelm the force of gravity from like, you know, 10 to the 30 iron nuclei. Yeah, obviously the electromagnetic force is stronger than gravity, but I guess I'm asking, like, if you have two electrons sitting next to each other, are they pulling on each other through gravity? I think they are, but we don't really understand exactly how that works, because we don't know how to combine a quantum uncertainty in their location with the classical theory of gravity we have, which doesn't allow for uncertainty in location.

Yeah, so if you bring a whole bunch of electrons together, they are going to be pulling on each other through gravity, but it's not enough to overcome the extreme repulsion they feel towards each other electromagnetically. That's right. So it's all just about the electromagnetic force. And if you wanted to have a pile of electrons, you might think like, hmm, can I like cool this down into a solid made out of just electrons? Can you like build a crystal out of just electrons?

Right. Well, I guess, you know, don't they have experiments where you're able to create electrons, right? And you're able to shoot at them. Can you just shoot a whole bunch of them together at the same time? Like that's kind of how our TVs used to work, right? Yeah, TVs used to work with cathode ray tubes where you would boil electrons off of a surface and then accelerate them towards the screen and then they would make a little flash of light. And we definitely do experiments where we like smash electrons into each other and annihilate them

to make other kinds of stuff. But I think what we want to do here is say, let's have a bunch of electrons and just like try to get them together to build something bigger than themselves. Can we like stack them together like Lego pieces? Can we get them to form some sort of structure? And then what emergent properties does it have? Does it flow? Is it shiny?

Does it conduct electricity? Does it taste good? Does it have constant volume or not? This kind of question is about the like emergent macroscopic properties of electron stuff. Right, right. But I guess I'm saying it seems impossible because if you try to put together some electrons together, they're just going to repel each other. So step us through what's the idea here for maybe trying to get them all together

into a crystal or some kind of structure. You can put stuff together that repels each other. You can stack magnets on top of each other, you know, north to north, south to south, et cetera. They'll just sort of sit on top of each other. So you can imagine stacking electrons in the same way where you like get a bunch of them together. You contain them somehow and then they fall into some pattern

which like minimizes the overall potential energy. So they're like have equal distances between each other. Well, I think that's the key word right there, containment, right? You somehow have to squish them together and keep them together. Would you do that with magnets or what? The first thing people tried is just making them cold. He's saying, like, let's just cool electrons down so they don't have a lot of kinetic energy

and then see where they settle. Do they settle down into something where they're like tiling themselves in a pattern, for example? But that didn't really work because when electrons get cold, their quantum wave functions get really wide. Same thing with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle there. That if you're cooling something down, their location uncertainty becomes really, really large and now you have all of these electrons whose wave functions are overlapping and now they're

interfering with each other and they tend to like slosh around and break things up. So the first approach just like cooling things down, that didn't really work. What does cooling down an electron mean? Just lowering its velocity? Yeah, just lowering its velocity. The idea here is to get a situation where the potential energy dominates over the kinetic energy. You want the location of the electron to be determined by its repulsion from the other electrons. You want to like stack these things together somehow into a lattice. So you need them to not be wiggling around very much. You want them to sort of like fall into a little well made by all the other electrons around

them. But they would be repelling each other. So I think you're saying like let's put it on like maybe a magnetic bottle or something where they're forced to be close to each other. And then you're asking what happens that? It's not a stable situation, is it? Yeah, you're right. Even if you built this thing, eventually it would basically blow itself up or there's nothing

else holding it together. So you need some sort of like outside containment. vessel or some other force. And we'll get into the experiments in a minute. Most of them use either some sort of like layers of 2D materials to hold these electrons together or some like external magnetic field or something to try to like group the whole thing together. So it doesn't just like blow itself up from the potential forces.

It's like putting a bunch of toddlers or four year olds together trying to get them to sit in a group or to stand in line. It's like it's pretty hard. You need some kind of external force. Exactly. So imagine for example putting a bunch of. marbles inside a bowl right and thinking about the lowest energy configuration you can like stack the marbles together so they're like regularly structured then they form this pattern and they're

all held together because they're inside the bowl and they're pushing against each other because they all have these surfaces so the question is like can you do that with electrons can you get a bunch of electrons and somehow get them together so they're like stack and that what does that make i see what you're saying yeah like if you take a bunch of electrons and like pressure cook them together or crush them together, what do they do on their own? Like, do they just slosh around like a soup? I think maybe you're asking, like, what's the phase of the thing if you put a bunch of electrons together?

Is it a solid or is it a liquid? Exactly, that's the question. What is the phase? And it's a famous physicist Ernest Vigner, who about 90 years ago thought about this, and he predicted that if you got a bunch of electrons together and you cooled them down, but you also didn't use too many.

You had like a low electron density, so they didn't bother each other too much, that you could form something called a vignor crystal, which is matter made out of just electrons. Electrons like tiled together in this way. Okay, Daniel, I think after 44 minutes, I finally understand the question we're asking here today. I think you're really asking is can you make solid matter out of pure electron?

That's kind of what you're asking. Can you build electron crystals? When you say matter, you're actually saying solid matter, right? Because you can have liquid matter. Well, we don't know what the phase of this is, right? Digner didn't know. Is it going to be a liquid? Is it going to be solid? Is it going to be some new kind of thing where neither solid nor a liquid can adequately describe it. We just don't really know what matter can do when you bring it together. The emergent properties of 10 to the 26 electrons, nobody knows what that is, you know? Is it tasty? Is it spicy? Is it shiny? These are the questions, right? Yeah. Really, the question I think you're asking is, what's the phase of a whole bunch of electrons that you squish together and force them to hang out? each other in a cold way because it's definitely going to be matter is just a question of what's the phase of that matter is it a solid or a liquid or something new yeah if you can succeed in building

that then exactly you can explore what is the phase of that what properties does it have is it something new is it similar to something we've seen before exactly right because it could just be like a liquid or some kind of um gas right or some kind of like totally random structure and vigner proposed that if you make these electrons cold enough and you space them out enough so there's not so much of a then they will form this thing he called a vigner crystal, which would be a new kind of solid with different properties than anything we've seen before. All right, well, let's get into what this electron crystal would look like, what's keeping it together and what are the forces, determining its structure,

and also what kind of experiments are being done to make one. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually. impelled metal, glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order. criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious well wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just water gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten. Monica Patton.

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now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, now that we understand the question, Daniel, after a half an hour, which is what happens to a bunch of elections when you squish it together, step us through the possibility. possibilities. Like, right? You can squish a bunch of electrons together, cool them down. Maybe they'll

just hang out in a random pattern or maybe they'll snap together in some kind of crystal. That's really what we're asking here today, right? And really the question is, can we get them into a crystal? Is that possible? And it seems really challenging because we say you can't just like cool a bunch of electrons down. There's no challenge in like finding electrons in making electrons, even in getting like a bunch of electrons. But in cooling them down to make a crystal is really interesting. People already think electrons inside of metal are basically like an electron liquid. So really the cutting edge of sort of like electron matter is focusing on these crystals. Is it possible to build these?

And because Vigner predicted this like 90 years ago, everybody's been trying to make it for decades. It's been like a holy grail of experimental condensed matter physics for a long, long time is trying to overcome the challenges of making this electron crystal. Now, do they try to make these like in a vacuum where it's just pure electrons or are you telling me that they're trying to make it inside of another material. They're trying to make it inside of another material and they're trying to use a bunch of tricks.

So people focused initially on like using magnetic fields to try to confine them. But that felt like impure because you have all these forces coming from the outside and it didn't really feel like it was an electron crystal. Wait, what? To me that would be more pure, right? Because then you're definitely just dealing with a little space of space with just electrons in it as opposed to like putting it inside of another material. Then there's all kinds of things in there.

It's not pure anymore. In this case, the magnetic field is helping align the electrons. It's not just like an external bottle pushing on the outside. It's throughout the whole bulk. And so this feels like then the order of the electrons is dependent somehow on the magnetic field more than the actual electric field of the electrons. People want to see like, can you build a crystal just out of the electric field of these electrons? All right.

So then you're saying that the experiments, they're now gravitating towards is to make these electron crystals inside of other materials. Exactly. So people are focused on 2D electron crystals. You can imagine these things in sort of several dimensions. Like imagine what a one dimensional electron crystal would be. That would just be like electrons evenly spaced along a line. When it's like sort of settled in where all the potentials are minimized, right? So the forces are all balanced. It's the lowest energy state. We'd just be a bunch of electrons along a line. Now in two dimensions on a plane, what's the sort of lowest energy configuration to build electrons? That would be what we call a triangular line. lattice. Or you think about like a triplet of electrons and then you just sort of like tile the whole floor with that triplet. And then in 3D it gets more complicated. You have like a cube with electrons at the point, maybe one in the center. But cubes are really hard and people have been focusing on 2D electron crystals. So like can you make a sheet of electrons constructed out like these triangles of electrons. So that's what people are focusing on. But I guess why are they aiming for these triangle structures? I mean, you don't know what's going to happen, right?

You don't know what makes you think it's going to form into triangle structures if I just, you know, throw a bunch of electrons on a tray. Well, that's the prediction from the theory, that that's the configuration that would minimize the energy of the arrangement. Remember that forces in the end are always trying to minimize potential. You know, force comes from like the negative derivative of the potential. The force always appears to push things to move to minimize potential. Like you have a ball on a hill, there's a gravitational potential. And the force of gravity is going to push that ball down the hill to minimize the gravitational. potential. And so this is just the prediction that comes out of that calculation that says this is the arrangement, the triangular lattice would be the lowest potential energy arrangement. So that's what nature will try to do. You're saying that's the grid that a bunch of electrons on a tray would fall into because I guess each electron is repelled by the other electrons, but they're also being pushed in all directions from the other electrons. So it's almost like they're containing each other. Yes, exactly. They're containing each other. So this 2D approach actually came out of completely different research.

People sort of accidentally made electron crystals using these 2D materials. Remember, we had a whole podcast episode about building two-dimensional materials, these like very, very thin sheets of things. We started with like graphene, which is a weird construction of carbon, where people were able to make like one atom layer thick of graphene by using scotch tape. Remember, and sticking it to like a piece of coal, basically, and pulling it off. And it actually comes off in these one atom layer sheets, which we consider like sort of 2D materials.

And then people did crazy stuff like making sandwiches, layers of these 2D materials, which have all sorts of other weird properties. Well, what they discovered in some of these experiments was you can get electrons trapped between some of these layers. So that gives you some of the confinement. And inside those layers, if you cool the electrons down and you didn't try to cram too many electrons in, they would actually form these electron crystals. Right. Interesting. Because I guess the electrons try to go up, but they're being blocked by the carbon.

and they try to go down and they're also blocked, but you're saying they can kind of flow freely from side to side and front and back. Exactly, but then if you cool them down, they tend to form this crystal. But why wouldn't they all just repel each other towards out to the sides? But you have some confinement out on the sides also.

And we talked about this once for 2D electron gases. Like if the electrons have a lot of energy, then they're not forming a crystal, right? They're forming like a 2D electron gas or 2D electron liquid. That's fascinating also because there's different mathematics that describes what happens

there. It's a really cool experiment to explore like the math of 2D objects. But here we're interested in like a 2D crystal. What happens when you cool everything down? How does it fit together? What properties does it have there? And what did they find? So they made the sandwich. They cooled the electrons in this sheet and did they snap into a crystal or did they just do random things. So people have been playing with this kind of thing for a long time and they suspected that they were electron crystals being formed. But it's kind of hard to tell because it's very fragile. Like how can you tell. How can you see it? People were trying to use things like scanning tunneling microscopes to see these electron crystals. But the problem with that is that you're basically using electrons to

probe it. And as soon as you like zap it, it just breaks the crystal. You need something which has really high spatial resolution, right, which can see an individual electron, but also somehow doesn't perturb the electron lattice. And those two requirements were like a conflict with each other, right? Because being sensitive to one electron requires like strong coupling to that one electron, but not messing up the crystal requires not having strong coupling to that electron. So they need to come up with a special trick to be able to see whether they were making these electron crystals. Because I guess how do you see an individual electron? Or can you poke an individual electron? Have we ever taken a picture of an electron? Yeah. So you can't take a picture of an electron

using photons typically because they have a wavelength that's smaller than the wavelengths of light that we can use. So typically people use these scanning, tunneling microscopes, which basically shoot electrons at a surface and see what angle they bounce off at. You can use that to make an image of an atomic surface. So like the highest resolution pictures we can take. That doesn't really work here because it basically smashes the crystal. The crystal is made of electrons and they're very, very fragile, right? Because they're all like very delicately balanced inside each other's electric fields. And now you're shooting a high energy electron into it. You're basically smashing the whole thing apart. So you can't see it with a scanning, tunneling, typical microscope.

Wait, are you saying it's unstable? I'm saying it's fragile, right? It'll hang out there by itself, we think, for a long time. But if you try to shoot electrons at it, it'll shatter. Then when it formed together again? Yeah, it probably will. But if you want to see it, then you need some way to probe it without shattering it. All right. So that sounds like a pretty tough problem. How are they solving it? Or have they solved it? They have solved it. There's a team at Berkeley that figured out a way to add another sheet on top of it. So they put a sheet of graphene on top of this electron crystal and then they imaged the graphene with a scanning tunneling microscope and they were able to figure out how the electron crystal affected the graphene. So it's sort of like

they put a sheet between themselves and the thing they wanted to see and they could probe the sheet and they could tell how the sheet was affected by the electron crystal behind it. Like you would see whether there was a kind of like a pattern imprinted on the sheet you put on top. Yeah. The presence of the electron crystal behind it changed the electron structure of the graphene above it, which you could then read from the scanning tunneling microscope. So it's sort of like one layer of indirection, but they could prove that it's there and they were able to like do all the reverse calculations to make an image.

So now we have an actual image of an electron crystal, which they published in this really cool paper in nature last year. We got a picture or an inferred picture of this Wigner crystal, right? Which is made out of pure electrons that are trapped inside of these layers. Yeah. And just as Vigner predicted, they fall into this triangular lattice. It's like a perfect triangular lattice. It's kind of beautiful to look at it and to see this like realization of what some dude with

pencil and paper almost 100 years ago predicted. But I guess what other forms could it have taken? Can it fall into a square? Patterns? If it had, that would have been a real surprise, right? Because we wouldn't understand that the prediction is this triangular lattice. That makes sense in terms of like minimizing the energy between the electrons. But you never know until you see the thing, like is it possible to make it at all and

does it have different properties from what we expect? And so if it had been a different shape, it had been like, you know, hexagonal or square lattice or something different, if it tiled itself differently, that would suggest that there's something else going on that hadn't been accounted for and that would be a cool clue, right? be a thread to unravel to learn something else about electrons. Well, I guess maybe one thing that was confusing me is this idea of phases. And I guess, you know, anything that is solid is basically a crystal, right? Like if you cool anything down, even quarks, like even the quarks inside of a proton could be said to be sort of like a crystal, right?

It's probably falling into some kind of pattern. It depends how much order there is, right? There are also other things like glasses that we talked about recently that are disordered at the microscopic level and don't always fall in. into a crystal. It depends a little bit on the forces between the things and how you're cooling it. How these things relax into their lowest energy state can determine whether they click together into an ordered structure, a crystal, or whether they're even disordered when they're cold and stuck together. All right. Well, that's pretty cool. They made a crystal of only electrons that is hanging out between these sheets of other materials. And so they prove that if you get a bunch

of electrons to cool them down, they do snap together into some sort of crystal. Yeah, exactly. It's a new kind of solid matter. As you said, it's a new phase of stuff made out of just electrons, which is pretty awesome. Well, it's not a new phase. Technically, right? It's a solid. It's a crystal. It's made out of something that hadn't been put together before. Yeah. Okay, sure. It's a new example of a solid made out of stuff we hadn't made solids out of before. But we think it might have different properties from other kinds of solids. There's another prediction for Bigner that said that you can melt this crystal into a new kind of liquid without. changing its temperature at all. So it does this weird kind of quantum melting?

What does that mean? Like, it just gets fuzzier. And can you melt it over a hamburger to make like a nice electron cheeseburger? I'm just brainstorming here for our food truck menu. It has to do with the quantum properties, right? A phase transition is when the same stuff arranged differently and gives you different macroscopic properties. And so Vigner predicted you could take this electron crystal and without changing its overall energy, it could do a phase transition to this other weird kind of phase. Cool. Well, they, I guess they did it. They made a solid out of electrons only. I guess what does that mean? What does that mean about our understanding about the electron? Well, it means Vigner was a smart dude and he knew what he was talking about. And it also means that we can now

continue to explore it in other directions. Like people can try to make multiple sheets of this thing to see like, what do multiple layers of this thing form? Can you get weird electrical properties out of it? Can you make like a 3D electron lattice just out of electrons? And what properties would that have? Right? Would it be conductive? Would it be not be conductive? All these sorts of questions. Every time you make a new kind of goo, you make stuff out of the same microscopic ingredients, but in a different way, you can make revolutionary new behaviors, right? All the kinds of behaviors we've seen in the universe just come from the kinds of stuff we've been able to put together. And we don't know what else matter is capable of when you put it together in new weird ways. So I guess now the electrons can feel a little bit better about themselves, right?

It's not just quarks. They can make structures. Now we know electrons can too. That's right. Electrons are doing it for themselves. They're not the loners we thought they were. They are able to play in a team. That's right. Electrons have now unionized. So watch out. That's right. Everything's going to cost more and come with a bigger charge. Exactly. The whole universe will be more negatively charged than before. All right. Well, another awesome example of how the universe keeps surprising us, you know. We think we know all of the ways that the stuff in it can click together and make stuff,

but there's always new and interesting situations that physicists can make to create new kinds of matter. And there's no telling what it's going to do and how it's going to surprise us. One day we'll make something which has a completely new kind of property we don't even have a word for today because we've never seen it before. And you'll see it first on our menu for our food truck because hopefully it won't kill you. It'll just taste good. And if it does kill you, hopefully your heirs don't sue us. All right.

Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young. professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all.

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