Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday March 21 2018, @11:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the Who-knew-basket-weaving-could-be-so-complex? dept.

Japanese basket pattern inspires new material

Researchers have produced a metal with exotic electrical properties by mimicking a pattern from Japanese basket-weaving.

Kagome baskets are characterised by a symmetrical pattern of interlaced, corner-sharing triangles; the pattern has preoccupied physicists for decades.

Metals resembling a kagome pattern on the atomic scale should exhibit peculiar electrical characteristics.

The team behind the first kagome metal has published details in Nature.

Their product is an electrically conducting crystal, made from layers of iron and tin atoms, with each atomic layer arranged in the repeating pattern of a kagome lattice.

When they passed a current across the kagome layers within the crystal, they found that the triangular arrangement of atoms induced strange behaviour in that current.

Instead of flowing straight through, electrons instead veered, or bent back within the lattice.

Trihexagonal tiling.

Massive Dirac fermions in a ferromagnetic kagome metal (DOI: 10.1038/nature25987) (DX)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.