electron energy

A cartographer who draws not mountains and rivers but invisible bonds between electrons: that's one way to describe the new neural network. Instead of atomic coordinates, it takes molecular orbitals and draws a graph where nodes are orbitals and edges are measures of their quantum entanglement.

Two pendulums on a shared string trade motion: push one, and the second starts swinging, and a moment later the first gets a push back. In a thorium-229 atom, energy flows nearly loss-free between the electron shell and the nucleus.

The mystery of the main break in the spectrum of galactic cosmic rays, the knee at 3 PeV, has persisted for nearly a century.

According to ordinary mechanics, an electron in an atom should spiral into the nucleus and crash into it, like a surfer losing speed and falling off the board. But atoms live for billions of years. Because space isn’t empty. Even in absolute vacuum, an invisible electromagnetic sea ripples — the zero-point field. Its waves continuously nudge the electron.

The Sun constantly emits a stream of charged particles — the solar wind. Among them are many electrons, some of which fly back toward the Sun. But observations show that fewer electrons return than expected.

A tiny tungsten tip with a radius of less than a hundred nanometers is the perfect stage for watching a quantum performance. Apply an electric field of a few volts per nanometer, and electrons start flying out of the metal: that’s field emission.

High above Antarctica, a balloon carried an instrument that caught electrons from space. These particles come from distant stellar explosions and other powerful events. The instrument measured their energy, like the force of an impact. And in one energy range, there were more impacts than calculations predicted.