New Quasi-Particle Found:

New Quasi-Particle Found:

Mysterious Quantum ‘Dropletons’ Form Inside Semiconductors Shot With Lasers

by Adam Mann

By shooting a semiconductor with ultra-fast laser pulses, scientists have discovered a new quasiparticle that behaves like a drop of liquid. They describe it as a quantum droplet, and named it “dropleton.”

These things were not predicted under any theory and surprised scientists when they appeared unexpectedly in extremely low temperature semiconductor experiments. They have properties unlike anything seen before.

“At first we scratched our heads,” said physicist Steven Cundiff of the University of Colorado and National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, one of the authors of a paper appearing today in Nature. “But then we came up with this idea that what we were seeing was this new thing we’re calling a quantum droplet.”

Now before you start asking questions like, “What?” and “Huh?” we probably need to break things down a little here…

(read more: Wired Science)

image: Baxley/JILA