As this animation shows, polaronic distortions start very small and rapidly expand outward in all directions to a diameter of about 5 billionths of a meter, which is about a 50-fold increase. This nudges about 10 layers of atoms slightly outward within a roughly spherical area over the course of tens of picoseconds, or trillionths of a second.
Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
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Poster illustration of public lecture featuring Ashley James
