New Evidence Suggests Electron has a structure!

[Mystery111]

No, read the first link swanson. You are like others here, seem to be taking the EDM as the main part of the investigation. The first link explains that they have measured the electron to be like a sphere. The first experiment is much more decisive than the first: '' What we find is, as best we can tell and we've looked really very carefully, there's no wobble. The electron shows all signs of being round at our current sensitivity.''

 

I was wrong. The consensus in 2011 may I think, the experiment measured the interaction of the field created by the particle, which was spherical. This did not imply the actual structure.

Edited September 26, 2011 by Mystery111

[ajb]

Their experimentation found no EDM. The experiments set the limit at 10^-29 e-cm. The "electron is a sphere" description is the journalist trying to translate the physics into a readable article. They're measuring the spherical symmetry of the electric field, not the electron itself.

 

The analogy here is with a classical spherical charge distribution, this has an electric field associated with it that has spherical symmetry. Any small deformation of our classical charge distribution from a perfect sphere would be detectable in the associated electric field.

 

The analogy or classical interpretation is thus born; the electron appears to be "very almost spherically symmetrical".

[questionposter]

How can an electron be a sphere when there's no gravity to pull it into a sphere? Shouldn't it be more like a wavey blob with a relative shape?

[swansont]

How can an electron be a sphere when there's no gravity to pull it into a sphere? Shouldn't it be more like a wavey blob with a relative shape?

 

Gravity is not the only force and in this case (as it generally is with subatomic physics) it's irrelevant. Nuclei can be spherical as a result of the strong and electromagnetic interaction. As ajb notes, with the electron it is an analogy.

[questionposter]

Gravity is not the only force and in this case (as it generally is with subatomic physics) it's irrelevant. Nuclei can be spherical as a result of the strong and electromagnetic interaction. As ajb notes, with the electron it is an analogy.

 

But how could electrons be a perfect sphere if they are so delocalized? A sphere isn't an undefined or unlocalized shape, it's a definite shape, and then when you actually observe an electron, it's merely a point. Maybe there's forces pulling the different points of an electron and protons by relation of triangles all the way around into a sphere, as in you can draw straight lines from where a proton "can" be to where an electron "can" be and get a definite shape, but the particles themselves don't act like that.

Edited September 27, 2011 by questionposter