Not sure if anyone has seen this, but it's pretty cool how researchers were able to copy the orbit of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids in a single atom. Here goes the original video: Jupiter's Trojan asteroids mimicked in a single atom
Unfortunately the video doesn't do well for me on my 2Ghz machine with missing drivers... Could you bring some elaboration to this? I find it fascinating regarding the diea, but that's a s much as I can comment on at this point.
The Trojans are at 2 Lagrange points in the Jupiter-Sun gravitational system, specifically those 60 degrees either side of Jupiter at the same orbital distance from the Sun. Electron orbitals are generally very symmetric, due to various straight forward (see associated Legendre polynomials). What the researchers seem to have done is alter orbital systems such that a wave packet is localised at a particular location, which then goes around and around the nucleus. Electrons don't have specific locations when they orbit a nucleus, unlike a planet going around a star. However, if you could make an electron behave semi-classically you'd expect it to look like a smudge going around and around the nucleus, like a fuzz of asteroids. However, the fuzz wouldn't be like the asteroid belt, it would be localised to a particular place in the orbit, just as the Trojans are in front or behind Jupiter. Hence the association. The wave packet isn't following or preceeding anything, it's just much the same visual make up as the Trojans, if you didn't also show Jupiter.
