Splitting of an electron inside a solid.

An electron has been observed to decay into two separate parts, each carrying a particular property of the electron: a spinon carrying its spin – the property making the electron behave as a tiny compass needle – and an orbiton carrying its orbital moment, which arises from the electron’s motion around the nucleus. These newly created particles cannot leave the material in which they have been produced. This result is reported in a paper published in Nature by an international team of researchers led by experimental physicists from the Paul Scherrer Institut (Switzerland), the group of Prof. Henrik Ronnow (Laboratory for Quantum Magnetism) and theoretical physicists from the IFW Dresden (Germany). These results may help understand high temperature superconductivity.

J. Schlappa et al., Nature 485, 82–85, doi:10.1038/nature10974 (2012)