Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
A rendering of the charge density wave. This pattern of dumbbells, each representing the electronic orbital on an oxygen atom, may look static, but if you look closely you'll see that the colors of the orbitals change as you move from left to right. This color change (yellow, white, blue, white, yellow, white, blue…) represents changes in charge density (high, medium, low, medium, high, medium, low…) moving across the plane from left to right.