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Twisted Physics: Magic Angle Graphene Produces Switchable Superconductivity
Last year, scientists demonstrated that twisted bilayer graphene — a material made of two atom-thin sheets of carbon with a slight twist — can exhibit alternating superconducting and insulating regions. Now, a new study in the journal Nature[$] [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1695-0] [DX] by scientists from Spain, the U.S., China and Japan shows that superconductivity can be turned on or off with a small voltage change, increasing its usefulness for electronic devices.
"It's kind of a holy grail of physics to create a material that has superconductivity at room temperature," University of Texas at Austin physicist Allan MacDonald said. "So that's part of the motivation of this work: to understand high-temperature superconductivity better."
The discovery is a significant advance in an emerging field called Twistronics, whose pioneers include MacDonald and engineer Emanuel Tutuc, also from The University of Texas at Austin. It took several years of hard work by researchers around the world to turn MacDonald's original insight into materials with these strange properties, but it was worth the wait.
See also: A Physics Magic Trick: Take 2 Sheets of Carbon and Twist
Previously: Graphene on the Way to Superconductivity
Graphene (With a Twist) Is Helping Scientists Understand Superconductors
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Thursday October 31 2019, @11:27AM (9 children)
This will change the world - at absolute zero.
This will change the world - at 3000+ GPa
These things don't fit under my desk :-(
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(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:11PM (1 child)
No worries, sentient machines will have no problems with adaptation to different physical domains, I am sure. Humanity is only an ephemeral implementation in a very narrow interval of physical reality. A bootstrap.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:58PM
Maybe that is truer than we realize.
Maybe the slowness of the boot process answers the Fermi Paradox.
Maybe the booted system has the good sense NOT to reach outward and make others aware of their existence. Everything moves underground. Solid state, except for robot maintenance. Environments and consciousness can be transparently moved across physical hosts so that hardware can be taken down for maintenance. On the planet surface all that remains are detection of incoming objects and planetary defenses. Everything else stripped bare for resources.
The VGER planet didn't seem to follow that model.
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
Still a pretty fucking cool reality hack.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:59PM
Also, even if it doesn't have the greatly desired applications, it may have other useful applications. How much of today's technology is based on useless scientific discoveries and parlor tricks in the past.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:48PM (3 children)
OK, what's "GPa". Google kept insisting on grade point average, and that makes no sense in context.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:56PM (2 children)
gigapascal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(unit) [wikipedia.org]
Approximate Young's modulus for common substances
nylon 6 = 2–4 GPa
hemp fibre = 35 GPa
aluminium = 69 GPa
tooth enamel = 83 GPa
copper = 117 GPa
structural steel = 200 GPa
diamond = 1220 GPa
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 31 2019, @08:41PM (1 child)
Thanks
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(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday November 02 2019, @04:15PM
The Pascal is also the SI unit of pressure, similar to 'PSI', I was actually referencing it as a pressure measurement.
A little while back there was an article that discussed superconductivity which occurred at room temperature, but it turned out it was at pressure ranges found deep inside Jupiter :-P
~3000 GPa is the (start of) the pressure range estimated for the center of Jupiter.
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(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Friday November 01 2019, @01:55PM
The Nature article says that the twisted graphene superconductor works up to 3 Kelvin, and then blathers about room temperature superconductivity because of some similarity to cuprates that work up to 150 Kelvin. Misleading; clickbait.