
The new article in Nature Communications focuses on a group of experiments conducted by physicists at the University of Cambridge and the University College London, UK, to demonstrate the properties of a new type of electron: an electron with a nucleus.
The group has developed a way to manipulate and control the electron so that its energy can be adjusted, and that it can also undergo chemical reactions that could lead to new materials.
The scientists hope to use this new material to make a new generation of electronic devices that are able to process and produce more energy from less material, and therefore reduce the cost of energy.
“We have created a new kind of electron that has the ability to be used to make materials with more electrical and chemical potential,” says Yousuf Naderi, a PhD student at the Department of Physics at the university.
“There’s something special about this kind of electronic electron that we’re able to manipulate, and we’re not only trying to make them more efficient, but also to make these materials more efficient.”
The team has also shown that a particular type of material called a metal ion can be used as a catalyst, and it is possible to manipulate the material to produce new compounds.
But how does this work?
“Our work is a kind of laboratory-scale experiments where we show that we can manipulate the electron’s energy state and its structure, and then it turns out to be possible to produce compounds that are good at doing this,” Naderis says.
“That’s really exciting.”
A second electron can be created in a different way.
The team created an electron that can also be made in a slightly different way: by using a different kind of process called condensation nucleation.
The researchers have developed a technique to create a new form of the electron.
The process involves condensing a molecule of nitrogen and hydrogen into a solution, and exposing it to light.
The light turns the nitrogen and the hydrogen atoms into a solid, which can then be melted and turned into a different form of electron.
In the new experiment, the researchers had to use a chemical reaction that produced a stable new electron.
This was achieved by using an atom of nitrogen that had been cooled to a certain temperature.
In this way, the atoms were condensed in a liquid and the nitrogen atom was turned into the electron, which has now been turned into something called a covalent bond.
“You can see how this process can be done, and you can see the new electron form and you see the formation of a bond,” Nadeshe says.
The atoms that were cooled to the same temperature are now being heated to temperatures that the electron can undergo chemical reactivity.
“This is what makes these experiments so interesting,” he says.
This process is called condensing nucleation, and its chemical properties are a result of a chemical bond between nitrogen and a salt of a particular metal.
“The chemical reactions in these reactions are so precise that they can be tuned,” Nadersis says, “which means that we are able, for example, to produce very fine-grained metals.”
Naderias team has been able to use the same process to make metal oxides, which are a type of metal used as electrodes in electronic devices.
In fact, the material used to create these oxides has a number of properties that make them good candidates for electronic devices: they have a good electrical conductivity, they are stable at a specific temperature, and they can store electrical energy.
The material they are making is made up of two different types of atoms, a metal and a silicon, with a different electrical conductance.
“I think that this is one of the most exciting new things that has happened to electronic materials in recent years,” Nasseri says.