No matter how high the energy, electrons won't break apart. But that doesn't mean they are indestructible. Using several massive supercomputers, a team of physicists has split a simulated electron perfectly in half. In the simulations, physicists from Duke University, the University of Zurich, and the University of Waterloo in Canada, developed a virtual crystal. Under extremely low temperatures in the computer model, the crystal turned into a quantum fluid, an exotic state of matter where electrons begin to condense.
Many different types of materials, from superconductors to superfluids, can form as electrons condense and are chilled close to absolute zero — about -459 °F. That's approximately the temperature at which particles simply stop moving. It's also the temperature region where individual particles, such as electrons, can overcome their repulsion for each other and cooperate.
The quasiparticles formed in this simulation show what happens if a fundamental particle were busted up, so an electron can't be physically smashed into anything smaller, but it can be broken up metaphorically. The researchers divided up a particle by placing a virtual particle with the fundamental charge of an electron into their simulated quantum fluid. Under the conditions, the particle fractured into two pieces, each of which took on one-half of the original's negative charge.
As the physicists continued to observe the new sub-particles and change the constraints of the simulated environment, they were also able to measure several universal numbers that characterize the motions of the electron fragments. The results provide scientists with information to look for signatures of electron pieces in other simulations, experiments, and theoretical studies.
