Experiment Reveals a New Type of Electron System

In most metals, the electrons behave as if they were independent of one another. Although each electron really does interact with the other electrons and phonons, the net effect is felt only as a kind of molasses through which the otherwise freely moving electron must slog. Thus one an usually treat metallic systems as a low‐density gas of weakly interacting particles, accounting for the average interactions simply by assigning an effective mass to the electrons. Such a model is commonly called a Fermi liquid. In one‐dimensional systems, however, the Coulomb forces between the electrons intervene more strongly and produce quite a different behavior.