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2024-11-11

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Scientists Found Dark Electrons: a Secret Quantum State Hidden in Solid Matter (www.popularmechanics.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/science

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Researchers have just found evidence of “dark electrons”—electrons you can’t see using spectroscopy—in solid materials.
By analyzing the electrons in palladium diselenide, the team was able to find states that functionally cancel each other out, blocking the electrons in those “dark states” from view.
The scientists believe this behavior is likely to be found across many other substances as well, and could help explain why some superconductors behave in unexpected ways.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Sounds like a very esoteric way of looking at things we don't fully understand yet. There have been countless of "invisible" things that we could not see before over the past few centuries alone. Hell, we cannot even really see other planets orbiting other stars themselves, but we can observe the effect they have on the parent star itself and thus know they're there. Just try to explain to someone from a few thousand years ago what germs are. A concept even many people today are struggling to understand, as we clearly saw within the last 4 years. Quantum science is complicated and seemingly weird, but it still follows rules that we have yet to fully learn, and I have no doubt that, if we had enough time, we'd figure that out just like we figured everything else out before.