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A team of researchers from the Universities of Manchester, Nottingham and Loughborough has discovered a quantum phenomenon that helps to understand the fundamental limits of graphene electronics.
Published in Nature Communications, the work describes how electrons in a single atomically-thin sheet of graphene scatter off the vibrating carbon atoms which make up the hexagonal crystal lattice.
By applying a magnetic field perpendicular to the plane of graphene, the current-carrying electrons are forced to move in closed circular "cyclotron" orbits. In pure graphene, the only way in which an electron can escape from this orbit is by bouncing off a "phonon" in a scattering event. These phonons are particle-like bundles of energy and momentum and are the "quanta" of the sound waves associated with the vibrating carbon atom. The phonons are generated in increasing numbers when the graphene crystal is warmed up from very low temperatures.
By passing a small electrical current through the graphene sheet, the team were able to measure precisely the amount of energy and momentum that is transferred between an electron and a phonon during a scattering event.
[...] Mark Greenaway, from Loughborough University, who worked on the quantum theory of this effect, said, "This result is extremely exciting—it opens a new route to probe the properties of phonons in two-dimensional crystals and their heterostructures. This will allow us to better understand electron-phonon interactions in these promising materials, understanding which is vital to develop them for use in new devices and applications."
More information: P. Kumaravadivel et al. Strong magnetophonon oscillations in extra-large graphene, Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11379-3
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:14PM (5 children)
Does anyone else get the feeling we live in a quantum reality. Like the AI has us all plugged into a digital matrix? I've recently begun seriously entertaining this possibility when I realized there have been no major changes or advances since about 2000 AD.
Maybe it has something to do with all those ketamine and pscilocybin treatments I just started taking?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:23PM (2 children)
Don't stop the treatments half-way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:46PM (1 child)
Even this pillow seems to be made of quantum foam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @01:00PM
I'm now typing this from inside the pillow, having inverted the usual human-pillow relationship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:31PM
I've probably mangled Feynman, but starting from that basic idea... to avoid an infinite regress, you will quickly find some stuff that doesn't look like more things. Every time someone brings up the "this makes it look like a simulation" point, I'm always reminded that no matter how your universe is structured, by the time you've made an experimenter in it, it's going to look like a simulation to them.
On the other hand, we do live in a simulation in some sense. We almost certainly exist in an information space which is far removed from the most fundamental physics, especially if the holographic principle is true. But there's no indication of intention behind it. The deeper we go and the more physics we find that doesn't look familiar to our everyday classical physics stuff, the greater the barrier it poses to any intention of controlling the everyday environment we experience from that deeper physics. So even if the simulation we live in was created deliberately by some intelligence, it seems unlikely they have any control over our macroscopic world.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 28 2019, @12:15PM
Physicists surely do.
Wait, that is a quantum reality?
Find evidence that there's root access and/or data from an external reality. Else this is going to remain a feeling.