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.
Massive Dirac fermions in a ferromagnetic kagome metal (DOI: 10.1038/nature25987) (DX)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 21 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)
Well, the reason for weaving baskets underwater is that that's necessary to maintain the pliancy of the reeds...so...
The analogy would be, perhaps, high temperature metallic basket weaving, to maintain the pliancy of the wires. Of course, from the summary I suspect that the wires are invisibly small, so you need to be quite dexterous in the handling of your tools.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday March 21 2018, @06:16PM
You could be quite dexterous in the handling of your tools, but when things have heated up and bending start to happen, invisibly small wire is just not gonna get it done.