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: 4, Interesting) by Zinho on Monday July 22 2019, @03:27PM (3 children)
Running the article through the Reasearcher-to-English translator, [xkcd.com] it sounds like we're about 10-25 years out from a new type of transistor based on this technology. From the fine article:
I'm reading this as saying that they have figured out how to make the material act as a transistor, but don't have a way to manufacture it with standard chip wafer technology; so we're a ways out from commercialization. Neat effect, though! I'll keep my eyes out for future "Mott Transistor" articles.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(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.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday July 22 2019, @05:57PM
The researcher to translator should also apply to the jargon and mathematics elegance that squeezes huge leaps of logic into a few mathematical statements. After that, the papers show the results and compare with previous studies.
Like x+y = z; Then moves on to show that their algorithm is able to compute the optimal answer of the meaning of life
I always felt so dumb and thought i was the only one, until I tried to implement a paper in path finding, published my implementation, and came with the sensation that very few people understood the implications of some seemingly arbitrary decisions taken in the paper. I got this feeling because people came to the project misled by the paper's scope in real life, and were sad when they found that the assumptions kind of defeated the purpose of path finding. I myself only understood the limited scope until I noticed that by mistake I had extended on the paper, because I misunderstood that the paper was more on the optimization of the path than on path finding itself. Probably did not invent anything but my ego says i did, and knowing academia it would have been enough to publish another paper eheheh
I digress...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 22 2019, @09:14PM
A lot can happen in 10 years, and there are several technologies that could replace today's transistors. They will gain more attention as we get closer to the "end" of the road.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday July 22 2019, @06:00PM
It just cannot be produced in a scale that can benefit humanity at large.
I had enough of qualities for graphene. They are already so many that I would be happy that it would just be boring from now on. What would be massive, is mass market production. Unfortunately it seems the worse ability of graphene.