
Originally Posted by
merumario
and i believe the above means we cannot voilate uncertainty and still have the electron as an isotropic particle....if it ever can be done then the electron will change some of its features making it less an electron...unless i am missing something.
You've mixed up several concepts in your post, and confused yourself by assuming things that aren't quite true.
The HUP tells us that, even at zero kelvins, there must still be motion (otherwise we'd know both position and momentum, say). That "zero point" motion is well understood, but has nothing whatever to do with the question of trapping an electron.
Light (more specifically, a laser) is a lousy tool for trapping a charged particle because of the large forces involved. It takes very little to move the electron out of the field of the laser, at which point you've lost it. Lasers (optical tweezers) work great on neutral particles, where this problem does not appear.
For charged species, the trap of choice is the Penning trap. CERN uses them as antiproton warehouses; physicists probing matter near absolute zero have trapped single electrons for many months at a time. By "trap" is not meant "stop all motion," so the HUP doesn't enter into the question in any direct way. You should interpret "trap" as meaning "confine to a small volume." There is certainly motion within that trapping volume (indeed, we probe the trapped charge by observing its resonance with an applied microwave field; and we cool it further by letting it radiate microwave energy).
So, we can "suspend" electrons, but using light to do it is fraught with such practical difficulty that we use the properly shaped macroscopic E- and H-fields of a Penning trap to do it instead. Cooling electrons down to tens of millikelvins is routinely achieved with such apparatus.