SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a graphene device that's thinner than a human hair but has a depth of special traits.
It easily switches from a superconducting material that conducts electricity without losing any energy, to an insulator that resists the flow of electric current, and back again to a superconductor - all with a simple flip of a switch. Their findings were reported today in the journal Nature.
"Usually, when someone wants to study how electrons interact with each other in a superconducting quantum phase versus an insulating phase, they would need to look at different materials. With our system, you can study both the superconductivity phase and the insulating phase in one place," said Guorui Chen, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Feng Wang, who led the study.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday July 22 2019, @05:27PM
Yes, don’t know what scales of gate density are achievable relative to present day CMOS, but the opportunity to dramatically reduce power consumption seems huge.