{"id":5463,"date":"2016-09-27T07:28:06","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T12:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=5463"},"modified":"2016-09-27T07:28:06","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T12:28:06","slug":"word-of-the-day-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/09\/27\/word-of-the-day-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

phonon<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Take what happens when you set a flame under a lump of table salt. The individual atoms all start rattling around a tad more enthusiastically, setting up waves of vibrations. In 1932, the Soviet physicist Igor Tamm realised he could treat these waves as particles, mathematically at least. He called them phonons.<\/p>\n

Phonons have since become a staple, helping us for instance to understand processes such as\u00a0superconductivity<\/a>, in which electrons flow through a material with zero resistance, and opening the way for devices that turn heat into electricity (see \u201cFive particles that don\u2019t exist \u2013 yet could change our world<\/a>\u201c). Because they emerge from the movements of more traditional particles, phonons are called emergent particles or quasiparticles<\/strong>. \u201cPhonons are not actually real,\u201d says Jon Goff<\/a>, a physicist at Royal Holloway, University of London. \u201cThey are really just a way of simplifying a very complicated problem.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A mathematical construct, it seems. But then they jam this into my brain:<\/p>\n

Phonons, magnons and the like exist in a kind of twilight world: useful to work out how things work, but doubtful as entities in their own right. But these half-existing particles aren\u2019t even the half of it. Quasiparticles can exist, it turns out, even when nothing is there.<\/p>\n

That discovery first came in 1947, with a seminal moment for the history of computing. William Shockley, a solid state physicist at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and his team were trying to perfect the transistor, an on-off switch for electrical current. They were using semiconductors, materials whose atoms are deficient in electrons. It had been known for a decade or so that this would create gaps of nothingness, like the empty square in a sliding puzzle. But no one thought these \u201choles\u201d were anything more than the absence of an electron. Shockley proposed that the hole was actually a particle in its own right, something like an electron that carried positive charge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even when nothing is there. Roll that around in your head for a while.<\/p>\n

(\u201cHoles in reality<\/em><\/a>\u201d,\u00a0Andrea Taroni,\u00a0NewScientist<\/strong><\/em>,\u00a010 September 2016, paywall)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

phonon: Take what happens when you set a flame under a lump of table salt. The individual atoms all start rattling around a tad more enthusiastically, setting up waves of vibrations. In 1932, the Soviet physicist Igor Tamm realised he could treat these waves as particles, mathematically at least. He \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5465,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463\/revisions\/5465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}