{"id":440814,"date":"2018-02-15T10:13:40","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T14:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=334b0af11a2af94b4b50d5b9638f19bf"},"modified":"2018-02-15T10:13:40","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T14:13:40","slug":"current-generated-when-light-hits-a-material-reveals-electrons-behaving-like-an-elusive-particle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=440814","title":{"rendered":"Current generated when light hits a material reveals electrons behaving like an elusive particle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A massless particle, a.k.a. Weyl fermion, predicted nearly 100 years ago, has been found in another corner of physics. Electrons in a semimetal can behave like these particles. They are either right-handed or left-handed\u2014they are mirror images like our hands. Theory predicted that Weyl semimetals could produce handedness-dependent electrical current by shining circularly polarized infrared light onto it. Scientists then confirmed and measured this current. Changing from right- to left-handed light switched the direction of the current, meaning they could determine the handedness of these electrons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A massless particle, a.k.a. Weyl fermion, predicted nearly 100 years ago, has been found in another corner of physics. Electrons in a semimetal can behave like these particles. They are either right-handed or left-handed&mdash;they are mirror images like our hands. Theory predicted that Weyl semimetals could produce handedness-dependent electrical current by shining circularly polarized infrared light onto it. Scientists then confirmed and measured this current. Changing from right- to left-handed light switched the direction of the current, meaning they could determine the handedness of these electrons.<\/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-440814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440814","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=440814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440815,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440814\/revisions\/440815"}],"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=440814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=440814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=440814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}