Persisting eddies

For more than a decade, physicists had assumed that the turbulence caused by electrons, which is nearly two orders of magnitude smaller, would be completely wiped out by the much larger eddies because the turbulence caused by ions (atoms with an electric charge) was so much larger.

According to conventional wisdom, these electron-scale whirls would be so small that their effects would be negligible even if the smaller eddies survived the larger-scale disruptions.

According to the new findings, this conventional wisdom was incorrect on both counts.