VIDEO: Mimicking Jupiter's Trojan asteroids inside a single atom

Rice University physicists have built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom. In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, Rice's team and collaborators from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could make an electron orbit an atomic nucleus in the same way that Jupiter's Trojan asteroids orbit the sun with the planet. The findings uphold a 1920 prediction by physicist Niels Bohr and could have implications for future developments in quantum computing.