Excitons are pairs of electrons and holes inside a solid material that together behave like a single particle. It has long been suspected that when many such excitons exist in the same piece of matter, they can form a single giant quantum state called a Bose-Einstein condensate \u2013 the same process which is responsible for a metal losing all its electrical resistance when it becomes a superconductor, for example. However, actually proving that Bose-Einstein condensation of excitons occurs in any real material has been a challenge for physicists for decades. An experiment done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, carried out in collaboration with UvA-Institute of Physics researcher Jasper van Wezel, has uncovered evidence that this elusive state of matter really does exist. Their results were published in Science this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Excitons are pairs of electrons and holes inside a solid material that together behave like a single particle. It has long been suspected that when many such excitons exist in the same piece of matter, they can form a single giant quantum state called a Bose-Einstein condensate – the same process which is responsible for a metal losing all its electrical resistance when it becomes a superconductor, for example. However, actually proving that Bose-Einstein condensation of excitons occurs in any real material has been a challenge for physicists for decades. An experiment done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, carried out in collaboration with UvA-Institute of Physics researcher Jasper van Wezel, has uncovered evidence that this elusive state of matter really does exist. Their results were published in Science this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-414469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=414469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414470,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414469\/revisions\/414470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=414469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=414469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=414469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}