Fractal patterns spotted in the quantum realm Feb 9, 2010 7
comments From thunderous mountain landscapes viewed from above
to the erratic trajectories of Brownian motion, fractal patterns
exist at many scales in nature. Physicists believe that fractals
also exist in the quantum world, and now a group of researchers
in the US has shown that this is indeed the case. This image
shows the fractal pattern that results when the waves associated
with electrons start to interfere with each other. A fractal is
a geometric entity whose basic patterns are repeated at ever
decreasing sizes. For example, a river system is an approximate
fractal pattern as the channels branch off into progressively
narrower tributaries moving upstream; at each confluence the
pattern is a smaller version of the previous branching. A sudden
transition Ali Yazdani at Princeton University in the US and his
colleagues have revealed that these patterns also exist at the
scale of individual atoms in a solid. And the key to this effect
is a sudden