atom electron

The electron—one of the fundamental building blocks of matter—turns out to be a perfect sphere. At least that's the finding of a study from researchers at the Imperial College London, which examined the shape of electrons over the course of a decade.

The scientists, led by Dr. Tony Hudson, reported their findings to the science journal Nature yesterday. Their experiment studied electron shape with lasers and was twice as accurate as any previous study on the subject. The conclusion: electrons are perfectly spherical to a mind-boggling accuracy of—wait for it—0.000000000000000000000000001 centimeters, or 0.0000000000000000000000000004 inches. That's supposedly so round that if the electron were expanded to the size of the solar system, it would only deviate from being round by less than the width of a human hair.

Why does this matter? The nature of electrons has a lot to say about a relatively new theory known as supersymmetry, which suspects there are correlating "sparticles" to regular particles. The sparticle counterpart to an electron would be a selectron, for example, with different properties. Supersymmetry suggests electrons may in fact be egg-shaped, but Hudson's research appears to throw a wrench in those works. The experiment doesn't necessarily disprove the theory, though, just that if electrons are egg-shaped, it's at a scale even smaller than this one could probe.

That's why the next step for the research is going to be studying the electron to even more accurate scales. Hudson hopes to improve the accuracy by four times in the next five years. Once that happens, he says the experiment will be able to make a definitive statement about supersymmetry.

"We'd then be in a position to say supersymmetry is right because we have seen a distorted electron, or supersymmetry has got to be wrong because we haven't," Hudson told the BBC.

Discrediting supersymmetry would pose a serious problem for proponents of superstring theory—a popular theory that attempts to unite the two otherwise incompatible physical theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. Supersymmetry (the "super" in "superstring") is a necessary component of the theory, which postulates that all matter is made up of extremely tiny strings that vibrate in 10 dimensions.
