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> The method developed by > Sun’s team can inject a > large amount of energy > into copper atoms and > made the electrons more > dense and stable, the
by dmitrygr 8y ago
> The method developed by
> Sun’s team can inject a
> large amount of energy
> into copper atoms and
> made the electrons more
> dense and stable, they
> said.
What is this pseudoscientific drivel? What the hell do they mean by "inject a large amount of energy" into atom? Can anybody actually explain what they created and what the properties of that material are?
- ghostly_s 8y agoI too wonder how you 'densify' an electron...
- gus_massa 8y ago<big IIUC warning> They are using sputtering that is a method that use a big spark to remove some Cooper atom from a surface and put the atoms in another surface. (You can use other metals instead of Cooper too.) The deposited Cooper atoms are not in the standard environment that they is use to be, like in a big Cooper metal block. So they attach to the surface in a weird configuration. In the new configuration, the elections don't have the usual distribution (like the electrons in the atoms of a metal Cooper bar). Anyway, the atoms of Cooper here don't have more or less electrons that usual, so they are still "metallic" with some definition. In the new rearrangement, the electrons are more densely packed. If you use the (wrong) Borh atom model, some of them have an orbit that is closer to the center than usual. With the correct quantum model, the idea is that some of the inner orbitals are usually empty, but here one of the electrons that is usually in an outer orbital falls into this usually empty orbital. (It's much more complicated, because the orbitals are not static and they are rearranged in each configuratio, and the orbitals are not a totally clear concept when you consider the quantum effect of correlation, but let's keep this simple.) So the new configuration is more compact, because one electron that is usually in an outer orbital is now in a inner orbital. The outer electron was easy to attack by other chemical substances. This gives Cooper some of it's usual properties. With the new configuration, it's more difficult to attack the electron, so the atoms have some (at least one) property that is similar to the properties of Gold. In particular, this property is useful to bound some Carbon atoms and help them react, so they can produce alcohol from carbon (and water and energy?). </big IIUC warning>
- dmitrygr 8y agoThank you