One-Electron-Thick Current

Correction: "If 1-electron-thick too thin to be *possible*"

F--king typos!!!

yes it is impossible. Not go back to playing with your blocks and marbles.

You might read up on quantum wires, which come pretty close to single file electron conductors.

Where are you measuring the thickness? One electron is one electron thick, if this is at all meaningful. jack

ps Is it possible to get a flow of water that is one molecule thick?

Around the flow of electrons.

Yes. I am referring exactly that. A stream of electrons that is one electron thick.

Now, is it possible to have an AC electric current that's 60 Hz, 5 volts, 0.01 amperes, and only 1-electron-thick?

If 1-electron-thick too thin to be possible, then what is the minimum thickness of electric current that's physically-possible?

If the conductor is copper? If its ionized air? If its a vacuum?

I wish I knew

My understanding is that electrons are continuously bumping around in the matrices of the substrate in which they occur and mass flow of these negative charged entities is possible in conductors. So if one electron follows another down a gap between two large atoms, is that what you would refer to as an electric current? At the size of the environment you are trying to imagine, I doubt that current flow is much of a meaningful concept. Perhaps if you used a six foot diameter copper pipe for a conductor, and you upped the frequency of the signal many orders of magnitude, the "skin effect" might spread the "current" electrons very thinly on the surface of the pipe, but they would be in a haze of oscillations backwards and forwards on the surface. I haven't done any sums to work out how big the conductor would have to be to carry this current, but doubling the minimum size that would be needed would still result in a mono-electron "skin" with the electrons just spread more thinly. This concept though is far from the truth as would be observed by one of the participating electrons. I don't know what the truth would actually be like. We can just make guesses using our experience of the world at our size, and according to all the tests we carry out on such phenomena.

The conductor would have to be so thin that the speed of flow of electrons for the current you have in mind would surely not be possible with only 5 volts pushing it. Anyway, if you could conceive of a monoatomic "wire" the electrons would be rattling about all around the surface of this impossibly small equipment.

So do I.

Why not do a calculation to see how many electrons must be passing a point in the conductor in one millisecond? might be enlightening.

jack

Thick as a Brick, you mean?

Same for sinister something of other.

Too bad about the accident.

good point.

damn those widths and heights and stuff.

one dimensional reality totally sucks.

lots of words talking about nothing.

Ah there is our trolling idiot again.

An electric current is generally NOT a "stream of electrons" as you seem to be envisioning it. A conductor, obviously, could not be "one electron thick" since conductors are not made of free electrons, but rather atoms. Your next question, no doubt, will be whether or not you can create a one-atom-thick conductor, and I will leave that to you.

Would it be possible to have an electron beam in which only one electron at a time were emitted? In theory, I suppose so, but then we'll run into other problems.

Sorry, no AC electron beams, at least not without some pretty odd cicrumstances that take this out of the realm of any practical consideration. (Like it wasn't already.) "5 volts" of current is meaningless.

Vacuum is not a conductor in the conventional sense; if you are talking about current "flow" through a vacuum, then you ARE talking about what is in essence a one-electron-at-a-time electron beam, and that's certainly possible, but so what? In the case of copper and other materials which would be acting as conventional conductors, the thickness of the conductor obviously could not be smaller than an atom of the conductor in question, and best of luck getting atoms to line up single file for any significant distance to play "wire" for you. Single-atom points of contact through which electrons might pass can certainly be envisioned, but then, so what? What's with this "thickness" nonsense, anyway?

If your real question is whether or not one can envision a "current" that's the equivalent of one electron at a time passing a given point - sure. But again, so what?

Bob M.

Sure. Just coat a large surface area with an atomic layer of a metallic conductor. I think single-layer conduction happens in carbon films, too.

John

Sure. Just find a suitable substrate, and deposit a 1-atom thick layer of some conductor by molecular-beam epitaxy.

To do .01 ampere, however, it would have to be quite wide.

Why not build one and report back with your results?

Good Luck! Rich

No, it would have to be one atom thick. You need an atom to pass the electrons between to get a flow of current.

John Fields wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Current is the flow of electrons (or holes) associated with a magnetic field

Charge is associated with an electric field.

Do you remenber Maxwells Equations??