Fractionally Charged Quasiparticles Signal Their Presence with Noise
DOI: 10.1063/1.882050
To particle physicists, the electron is the quintessential example of an elementary particle: The highest energy experiments to date have revealed no evidence of any internal structure, no evidence that an electron is made up of some other, more fundamental components. But for condensed matter physicists studying the behavior of matter at low temperatures in semiconductor crystals, electrons can play by a different (although ultimately equivalent) set of rules. The fractional quantum Hall effect, for example, can be explained by invoking quasiparticles, which behave like distinct particles that each carry a fraction of an electron’s charge. (On a more fundamental level, quasiparticles are collective excitations of interacting electrons.) Two recent experiments in Israel and France have added to the evidence that these quasiparticles exist.
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