By Oliver Baker
With two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and a bit of mathematical sleight of hand, physicists have accomplished a longstanding and yet remarkably humble goal. They have described what happens when an electron collides with an atom.
Underlying everything from the glow of fluorescent light bulbs to the chemistry of stellar gases, such submicroscopic impacts are a cosmic commonplace. However, even after boiling down the problem to just three particles an incoming electron, the proton of the target hydrogen atom, and the atom’s own orbiting electron’ physicists have failed to describe the event in full mathematical detail.