Heavy electrons viewed in latest microtechnique news

Heavy electrons have featured in microtechnique news headlines recently after being imaged for the first time.

They were viewed using a microscope intended to display the interaction and arrangement of electrons in crystalline structures.

But scientists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, instead used the microscope in a technique called spectroscopic imaging scanning tunnelling microscopy.

This is able to assess electron energy by counting how many reach the probe as it scans the surface of the material - similar to the highs and lows of waves on the ocean's surface.

What they found was unexpected, as some electrons seemed to be very heavy, which could equally be an effect of them having been slowed down somehow.

Brookhaven physicist Seamus Davis says: "Physicists have been interested in the problem of heavy fermions - why these electrons act as if they are hundreds or thousands of times more massive under certain conditions - for 30 or 40 years."

The team suggests that interactions between the electrons and the atoms they orbit are causing the particles to slow, making them appear heavier.