News From the Field
Rice Lab Mimics Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids Inside a Single Atom

January 24, 2012

Rice University physicists have built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom. In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, the Rice team and collaborators from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could make an electron orbit the atomic nucleus in the same way that Jupiter's Trojan asteroids orbit the sun. The findings uphold a 1920 prediction by physicist Niels Bohr. Full Story

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Rice University

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