Electrons go superballistic
A new finding by physicists at MIT and in Israel shows that under certain specialized conditions, electrons can speed through a narrow opening in a piece of metal more easily than traditional theory says is possible. This “superballistic” flow resembles the behavior of gases flowing through a constricted opening, however it takes place in a quantum-mechanical electron fluid, says MIT physics professor Leonid Levitov, who is the senior author of a paper describing the finding that appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In these constricted passageways, whether for gases passing through a tube or electrons moving through a section of metal that narrows to a point, it turns out that the more, the merrier: Big bunches of gas molecules, or big bunches of electrons, move faster than smaller numbers passing through the same bottleneck. The behavior seems paradoxical. It’s as though a mob of people trying to...