Moore Foundation grantees at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created an exotic 3-D racetrack for electrons in ultrathin slices of a nanomaterial.
Led by foundation grantee James Analytis, a Moore Fellow in Materials Synthesis through the Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems initiative, the international team of scientists observed for the first time a unique behavior in which electrons rotate around one surface, then through the bulk of the material to its opposite surface and back.
“Microchips lose so much energy through heat dissipation that it’s a limiting factor. The smaller they become, the more they heat up,” said Analytis, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab and assistant professor of physics at UC Berkeley. “What’s exciting about these phenomena is that, in theory, they are not affected by temperature, and the fact they exist in three dimensions possibly makes fabrication of new devices easier."
The ultimate goal of this work is to approach the lossless conduction of another class of materials, known as superconductors, but without the need for the extreme, freezing temperatures that superconductors require.
The possibility of developing so-called “topological" materials that can carry electrical current on its surface without loss at room temperature has attracted significant interest in the research community. Topological materials are the subject of today's Nobel Prize in Physics, granted to David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz. The Nobel Prize winners were not part of the Berkeley Lab study.
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