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posted by chromas on Thursday October 31 2019, @09:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the twisted-carbon dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:11PM (1 child)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:11PM (#914105) Journal

    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

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:58PM (#914137) Journal

    A bootstrap

    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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