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So what exactly is a Weyl fermion? Although we're often taught in high school science that the Universe is made up of atoms, from a particle physics point of view, everything is actually made up of fermions and bosons. Put very simply, fermions are the building blocks that make up all matter, such as electrons, and bosons are the things that carry force, such as photons.
Electrons are the backbone of today's electronics, and while they carry charge pretty well, they also have the tendency to bounce into each other and scatter, losing energy and producing heat. But back in 1929, a German physicist called Hermann Weyl theorised that a massless fermion must exist, that could carry charge far more efficiently than regular electrons.
And now the team at Princeton has shown that they do indeed exist. In fact, they've shown that in a test medium, Weyl electrons can carry charge at least 1,000 times faster than electrons in ordinary semiconductors, and twice as fast as inside wonder-material graphene.
Most notably, it might we be possible to build better ways to produce them en masse for further study. The strange monopole arrangement they express is still puzzling scientists, but applications may abound:
What's particularly cool about the discovery is that the researchers found the Weyl fermion in a synthetic crystal in the lab, unlike most other particle discoveries, such as the famous Higgs boson, which are only observed in the aftermath of particle collisions. This means that the research is easily reproducible, and scientists will be able to immediately begin figuring out how to use the Weyl fermion in electronics.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 27 2015, @04:30PM
Capacitive dielectric heating. In theory a superconducting vacuum capacitor dissipates no heat but real dielectrics like doped silicon transistors (or any form of matter, anything but a decent vacuum) will dissipate power in a capacitor. I'm assuming the gate and wiring will still have capacitance.
I suppose you could do ultra low voltage and power your 0.00001 volt CPU with a homopolar generator outputing a million amps. That is a strange idea to think about. I suppose thermal noise voltage would set a lower bound on operating voltage, although the impedance is likely to be "kinda low" at that current level so maybe ...
Just saying it'll be a gain, but there are sources of heat aside from simple ohmic losses.
I like thinking about the opposite extreme, what could I do with a switching transistor with losses lower than bulk copper. Won't the packaging be interesting? Imagine a motor controller for a high performance electric sports car the size and weight of a flash drive. In fact you could build things like motor controllers into plugs and sockets. You could build some interesting class-E RF amplifiers, depending a lot on capacitance/inductance of an actual device.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @07:48PM
The anti-tube... drop voltage low enough and the system will have to live in a shielded cage to prevent ambient fields from inducing logic errors.