These articles says the electron is a near perfect sphere: https://futurism.com/electron-edm-experiment
So, what is our intuitive answer to the question? In all artists’ impressions of the atom, we see the electron depicted as a small shiny sphere orbiting the nucleus, so a reasonable guess would be to say that the electron is a snooker/billiard ball shape and according to the experiment of a joint project between physicists in Yale and Harvard known as ACME (Advanced Cold Molecule Electron-EDM), that is very close to the truth so full marks if you got that, and commiserations to anyone who was hoping the electron was going to be shaped like anything more exciting.
https://phys.org/news/2013-12-electron-shapeliness-supersymmetry.html
A small band of particle-seeking scientists at Yale and Harvard has established a new benchmark for the electron's almost perfect roundness, raising doubts about certain theories that predict what lies beyond physics' reigning model of fundamental forces and particles, the Standard Model.
In research published Dec. 19 in Science Express, the team reported the most precise measurement to date of the electron's shape, improving it by a factor of more than 10 and showing the particle to be rounder than predicted by some extensions of the Standard Model, including some versions of Supersymmetry.
Researchers said they have shown that the electron's departure from spherical perfection—if it exists at all—must be smaller than predicted by many theories proposing particles the Standard Model doesn't account for. If the electron's shape is too round, many of these theories will be proven wrong, they said.
And yet I've seen it said that the electron is actually an electron cloud, like a cloud of electron quanta. Or a probability cloud, a cloud of probabilistic positions. And I've seen it said that what it is, depends on the circumstance, whatever is most appropriate for the physics problem at hand.
So, in which cases is the electron which model? Perfectly spherical ball, or cloud, or probability distribution. When is it appropriate to consider the electron as one of these things, and when is it appropriate to consider it the other?
