Tahan Research

Condensed-matter physicists have their own particle zoo – a menagerie filled with familiar and exotic quasiparticles including old favourites like holes and phonons, and newer additions such as surface plasma polaritons. Quasiparticles are excitations in a solid that behave like tiny particles and obey quantum mechanics. A phonon for example, is a quantized sound wave that propagates through a crystal.

Now Charles Tahan and colleagues at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences just outside Washington, DC have shown that the interaction between phonons and electronic excitations in certain semiconductors can be described in terms of a brand new quasiparticle called the phoniton.

Theorists propose an experiment to observe a “phoniton,” a novel hybrid of an electron and a quantum of vibration in a crystal lattice.

Vibrations in a crystal can combine with an electron in a new way to form a hybrid quantum entity, according to a team of theorists publishing in Physical Review Letters. They call it a “phoniton,” a particle that combines a phonon—the quantum form of vibrations—with a matter excitation, such as an electron that transits between two levels. The team also proposes a nanostructure that would support this quantum state and allow it to be observed.