I was reading an article today:
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-demon-physicists-year-old-massless-neutral.amp
…and it got me thinking. If electrons have mass and charge, how can they combine together in a metal and become massless and charge-less? Where does the mass go? I’m assuming it becomes energy because of e=mc^2, but what does that energy manifest as?
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I’m unfortunately not a material scientist, if we’re talking more than 3 particles/bodies at a time that’s not my area of expertise lol. But what I can say is that particles turn into other particles all the time. Through many, many different processes, but yeah something that has mass and charge can essentially dump its mass and charge into something else, itself turning into something charmless and massless. Now in the standard model of particle physics, there’s only one massless and chargeless particle, the photon, but maybe a material scientist can fill in what’s going on here. They’re talking about the energy bands in metal, and yeah that is far outside my area of expertise. Only discrete energy levels for me.
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