This result is reported in a paper published in Nature by an international team of researchers led by experimental physicists from the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland) and theoretical physicists from the IFW Dresden (Germany).
All electrons have a property called "spin," which can be viewed as the presence of tiny magnets at the atomic scale and which thereby gives rise to the magnetism of materials. In addition to this, electrons orbit around the atomic nuclei along certain paths, the so-called electronic "orbitals." Usually, both of these quantum physical properties (spin and orbital) are attached to each particular electron. In an experiment performed at the Paul Scherrer Institute, these properties have now been separated.
X-rays split the electron into a spinon and an orbiton