Splitting headache

From the boundaries of science this week, we bring the news that someone just cut an electron in half, which we thought wasn’t possible.

In an operation that makes the Large Hadron collider look like a bunch of kids playing marbles, Duke University physicist Matthew Hastings, Sergei Isakov of the University of Zurich and Roger Melko of the University of Waterloo in Canada made a simulated electron using three supercomputers, chilled it close to pretend absolute zero, and found that under certain conditions their electron split in half, a bit like hitting the world’s smallest frozen nut with the world’s largest virtual sledgehammer.

Our admiration is tempered only by the realisation that this isn’t a real nut, sorry, electron. Their paper didn’t say if the boys cleared up after themselves, or just went to the pub leaving bits of broken electron all over the simulated floor, forcing their pretend girlfriends to get the tiny hoover out.