picocoulomb

A plastic film as thin as a hair, and inside it — platinum dots smaller than a millionth of a millimeter. These dots sit at the boundary between two transistor layers and catch electric charge like a sponge catches water. As charge accumulates, the transistor changes its resistance, and remembers that state.

Water in a glass looks continuous, but it's actually a dance of trillions of molecules constantly breaking and forming bonds. Seeing this dance in full detail was previously impossible: accurate calculations that account for the quantum properties of electrons could only handle tiny droplets of a few hundred atoms. The new model UBio-MolFM changes the game.

Electric charge is a slippery thing. You can measure how much there is in the entire universe or in a single particle, but try to point your finger and say, 'Right here, in this cubic centimeter, there is exactly this much charge right now,' and you hit a fundamental wall. The issue is that total charge, which physicists denote by the letter Q, is nonlocal.

Any battery, from a AA to a quantum one, is simple in principle: there's a store of energy, and there's a way to get it out. In the quantum world, this 'way' looks like a careful switching between particle states, akin to moving a ball from a high shelf to a low one.

A quantum computer is like an orchestra where each ion is a musician and laser pulses are the conductor's baton. But if someone in the audience rustles, the delicate melody of quantum states goes off key.

Every 15 hours, in a constellation 57 light-years away, a miniature solar eclipse takes place. A tiny white dwarf — a star the size of Earth but heavier than the Sun — ducks behind the disk of a red dwarf. For astronomers, this is not just a pretty coincidence but a way to peek into the pair's past.

A drop of metal on a semiconductor is like an island in the sea. For an electron to reach that island, it must pay a "toll": overcome a barrier that arises because the island is tiny, and each extra charge significantly changes its energy. This phenomenon is called Coulomb blockade. It underpins single-electron transistors, where current flows one electron at a time.

The nucleus of deuterium, or the deuteron, can be pictured as a microscopic spinning top. If its charge distribution is not perfectly symmetric, then in an external electric field this top experiences a minuscule tilt of its spin axis.

Water in a kettle heats to 100 degrees, and stops being water, turning into steam. Something similar happens to atomic nuclei when they are smashed together at enormous speeds in the Large Hadron Collider.

After an injection under the skin, a drug doesn't just spread out like ink in water. Antibody molecules carry an electric charge, and that charge makes them interact with surrounding tissues — much like a magnet attracts or repels iron filings.