Often, in high school and undergraduate physics classes, atoms are intuitively presented according to the outdated planetary model: a swarm of electrons orbiting the nucleus, like planets around the sun. The progress in the understanding of the subatomic world in the early 20th century, and the advent of quantum mechanics, made the description of atoms much more complex. There is a boundary between the world of our everyday perception and the subatomic, distinctly quantum world—where Newtonian mechanics breaks down and the laws of quantum reality rule undisturbed. This boundary, however, is hard to place. For systems of sufficiently large sizes, their quantum behaviour can be better and better approximated by Newtonian mechanics, which rather accurately describes forces and motion up to the planetary scale and beyond. By studying large enough atoms and their cloud of electrons, Rice University researchers managed to simulate the orbits of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, just there, at the boundary between the baffling quantum world (where subatomic particles such as electrons are more accurately described by fuzzy, delocalised wave functions) and the reality of planetary orbits. “Rice lab mimics Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids inside a single atom”, Rice University press release Wyker et al., “Creating and Transporting Trojan Wave Packets”, Physical Review Letters (2012)
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Often, in high school and undergraduate physics classes, atoms are intuitively presented according to the outdated planetary model: a swarm of electrons orbiting the nucleus, like planets around the sun. The progress in the understanding of the subatomic world in the early 20th century, and the advent of quantum mechanics, made the description of atoms much more complex. There is a boundary between the world of our everyday perception and the subatomic, distinctly quantum world—where Newtonian mechanics breaks down and the laws of quantum reality rule undisturbed. This boundary, however, is hard to place. For systems of sufficiently large sizes, their quantum behaviour can be better and better approximated by Newtonian mechanics, which rather accurately describes forces and motion up to the planetary scale and beyond. By studying large enough atoms and their cloud of electrons, Rice University researchers managed to simulate the orbits of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, just there, at the boundary between the baffling quantum world (where subatomic particles such as electrons are more accurately described by fuzzy, delocalised wave functions) and the reality of planetary orbits.

“Rice lab mimics Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids inside a single atom”, Rice University press release

Wyker et al., “Creating and Transporting Trojan Wave Packets”, Physical Review Letters (2012)