Wigner Crystals

I’d like to explain a conjecture about Wigner crystals, which we came up with in a discussion on Google+. It’s a purely mathematical conjecture that’s pretty simple to state, motivated by the picture above. But let me start at the beginning.

Electrons repel each other, so they don’t usually form crystals. But if you trap a bunch of electrons in a small space, and cool them down a lot, they will try to get as far away from each other as possible—and they can do this by forming a crystal!

This...