this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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Misleading headline. Article goes badly wrong in its attempt to ELI5 …..
It’s not “direction”‘that’s affected, but electron transitions to either higher or lower states ….. I think. This article is horribly written if they wanted to communicate anything
Edit: the article does link to the original paper but someone else will need to translate that. It looks more like they were able to produce a formerly theoretical quantum particle (not electron) and show weird behavior. I still don’t know what “direction” means, because it’s relative to how its quantum state changes. I don’t think direction means direction in the macro sense but I don’t know what it does mean
I was misled in the posted article with hints about energy levels that reminded of electron shells. The original article makes it clear these are not electrons but talks about quantum states in a vaguely similar way (at least according to my limited understanding)
I don't think that's what they're saying. They're measuring a property that should scale linearly with Landau levels and the strength of the magnetic field by a known factor. There's one possible factor for massive particles, and another for massless ones. In this experiment they observed a third value for the factor that lies between those two, one which matches the predictions of these semi-Dirac fermions. The particles in question are electrons in a semi-metal, so I think that can mean actual movement in the sense that we usually think of the word
That said this is waaay beyond my level of physics, even with the professor attempting to dumb it down for us
For sure directions is related to different planes or lines along the crystal.