PHYSICAL REVIEW FOCUS 2 December 2005 http://focus.aps.org/
David Ehrenstein, American Physical Society

Introductions to the Focus stories of the past week;
visit http://focus.aps.org for the complete stories.

THE HOLE CRYSTAL
Ordinarily, a crystal is a regular array of particles, such as
atoms. But now a team of researchers has described the
opposite--a crystal made entirely of holes immersed in a
sea of particles. In the <nobr>2 December</nobr> PRL they
report computer simulations showing that, under the right
conditions, the holes within a semiconductor's electron
"sea" can crystallize. They suggest how such crystals
could be coaxed to form and note that similar crystals
might occur naturally within stars and other astronomical
objects.
(M. Bonitz et. at., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 235006)
Link to the paper: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v95/e235006/
Complete Focus story at http://focus.aps.org/story/v16/st17