New Metal Created 60 Years After Wigner Predicted Its Structure
Scientists at Louisiana State University (LSU; Baton Rouge; 225-388-8654), say they have verified the creation of Wigner crystals—a new metal that was first mathematically predicted 60 years ago. The material is called lanthanum-doped calcium hexaboride and looks like thin silver-gray slivers of lead. Its applications are not yet known.
How It's Done
Wigner's Prediction
Eleven scientists from the United States, Switzerland, and Brazil worked for a year and a half to create the Wigner crystal. The metal was finally created by Zachary Fisk and David Young at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (Tallahassee, FL), by adding a small bit of lanthanum to a combination of calcium and boron.
Roy Goodrich, physics professor at LSU, and Donavan Hall, a researcher at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, were in charge of proving that the new substance is a metal. The scientists report that they have now done so.
Researchers on the team that discovered the material say that the discovery is on a par with the 1995 creation of the Bose-Einstein condensate. However, that condensate is difficult to study because it requires expensive equipment and extremely low temperatures to create and maintain. The Wigner crystal will be easy to study as it is inexpensive to create and is stable at room temperature.
Wigner's Prediction (Back to Top)
The crystals were first predicted in 1934 by Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wigner came to the United States and eventually joined the faculty at Princeton University. Each year from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s, he spent six weeks at LSU to teach and conduct physics research.
Wigner predicted that if a metal could be made with a sufficiently low number of electrons, its electron spin would create a unique set of properties in the material. Proving this theory correct, electrons in the new Wigner crystals move in formation, maintaining a crystalline structure when they flow. All of the materials' properties are not yet known, as its crystalline structure has not yet been tested. Similarly, its applications are not yet known.
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory is the only laboratory of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. It provides scientists with unique high-field magnets to explore phenomena at the extremes of magnetic fields, temperature, and pressure.
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